¹ Laslett, P., ‘Size and structure of the household in England over three centuries’, Population Studies 23 (1969), 199–223.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

² Anderson, M., Approaches to the history of the western family 1500–1914 (London, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chap 2.

³ Some introductory further discussion of many of these issues can be found in Anderson, Approaches, chap 1; and Wall, R., ed., Family forms in historic Europe (Cambridge, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap 1.

⁴ The project to produce a ‘National sample from the enumerators books of the 1851 census of Great Britain’ has been supported by three grants from the SSRC/ESRC (HR2066; H00230016; H00232032). The initial software was designed by Craig Stott and an enhanced version was developed by Linda Aitken. The CENDEP package was the responsibility of John Welford and Barbara Petrie. The main part of the work involved in preparing the data and enhancing it in the ways described in this paper fell initially on Brenda Collins, and subsequently on Linda Croxford and Alison Morrow.

The objectives of the project were described in two papers by Michael Anderson, Brenda Collins, and Stott, Craig: ‘The national sample from the 1851 census of Great Britain’, Urban History Yearbook (1977) 55–59Google Scholar, and ”The national sample from the 1851 census of Great Britain: an interim report on methods and procedures’, Historical Methods Newsletter 10 3 (1977) 117–21.Google Scholar An account of the subsequent development of the project is contained in the National sample from the 1851 census of Great Britain: introductory user guide, obtainable from the ESRC Data Archive at the University of Essex.

⁵ A microfiche version of the complete transcript, together with a short guide to its preparation was published by Chadwyck-Healey in 1987. The transcript data in machine-readable form, and several subsequent generations and versions of the data, including the Public Data Format files which were used to generate the data set used in this paper, are available from the ESRC Data Archive at the University of Essex.

⁶ A copy of this package, and of the associated documentation is deposited in the ESRC Data Archive and may be obtained on request by users wishing to develop further subsets of the data for their own purposes.

⁷ ‘Cohabiting couples’ are almost exclusively couples where a spousal relationship can be deduced from the ‘relationship to head’ data field, but where the marital status of one or both partners is not given as ‘married’. In isolated cases terms like ‘concubine’ are used. Cohabitation is not inferred in this analysis on the basis of situational inference (e.g. male head coresident with female lodger) alone. Undoubtedly most of these couples were in fact married but failed to provide full information on their marital statuses.

⁸ For the CENDEP package, see note 4. SIR is the ‘Scientific Information Retrieval’ integrated database system, a commercial package widely available on mainframe computers with particularly powerful hierarchical data-handling facilities.

⁹ The figures are from the version published by Wall, Richard in ‘The household: demographic and economic change in England, 1650–1970’, in , Wall, ed., Family forms, 493–512.Google Scholar

¹⁰ See note 1 and Laslett, P., ‘Mean household size in England since the sixteenth century’, in P., Laslett, ed., Household and family in past time (Cambridge, 1972) 125–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ Calculated from Laslett, Household and family, table 4.6; the ‘mean experienced household size’ is mean household size weighted by the number of persons in each household and is neatly given intuitive meaning by Laslett as ‘a single measure of all the answers which would be given if every member of a community were asked, what size of household do you live in?’ (Laslett, 40). For later censuses, published figures are usefully assembled in Laslett, Household and family, 138–43. The 1981 figure is from the National report from the Census of Great Britain (1981)Google Scholar table 34.

¹² Census of England and Wales, 1981: household and family composition, table 1.

¹³ Wall, R., ‘Regional and temporal variations in English household structure from 1650’, in J., Hobcraft and P., Rees, Regional demographic development (London, 1977), 94, 98.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Comparative figures for earlier and later periods are in Wall, ‘The household’, 500. The proportion of all 1851 relatives who were parents or parents-in-law was substantially lower than in Wall's twentieth century or than in his pre-1821 data. The proportions who were siblings seems have remained fairly constant over the past three centuries, and the proportion of sons- and daughters-in-law in 1851 was not very different from the pre-1821 data, though lower than the twentieth century figures. Nieces and nephews and grandchildren seem to have been an especially significant element in the household structure of Victorian Britain.

¹⁵ For discussions of these ‘parentless’ kin see especially Anderson, M., ‘Household structure and the Industrial Revolution: mid-nineteenth-century Preston in comparative perspective’ in , Laslett, Household and family, 223–28Google Scholar, and the interesting recent findings of Wall, R., ‘Work, welfare, and the family: an illustration of the adaptive family economy’ in L., Bonfieldet al., eds., The world we have gained: histories of population and social structure (Oxford, 1986), 287–89.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Wall, ‘Regional and temporal variations’, 94, 98.

¹⁷ These findings are an important antidote to the work of writers such as McBride, Theresa, The domestic revolution (London, 1976)Google Scholar; for a more balanced view see Davidoff, Leonore, ‘Mastered for life: servant and wife in Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Journal of Social History 7 (1974) 406–28.Google Scholar

¹⁸ They were encouraged in this by the fact that the examples and instructions given to enumerators included an example containing a ‘Visitor’ but made no mention anywhere of lodgers. From time to time a complete enumerator's book appears in the sample with no lodgers but many visitors, in an area of the country where many lodgers might normally be expected.

¹⁹ Laslett, Household and family, 220; editors' note to table 7.3.

²⁰ For some discussion of this point and demonstration of the importance of considering secondary families in all family and household analysis, see Anderson, M., Family structure in nineteenth-century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971)Google Scholar, chaps 5, 9 and 10.

²¹ Compare a figure in excess of 85 per cent for England and Wales at the 1981 census (computed from Census of England and Wales: Household and family composition, table 1).

²² The figure for 1981 was somewhat in excess of one family in eight (from ibid).

²³ For an interesting recent demonstration of this point for one particular settlement, see Robin, Jean, ‘Illegitimacy in Colyton, 1851–1881’, Continuity and Change 2, 2 (1987) 324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁴ Census of England and Wales; household and family composition, table 1.

²⁵ For some preliminary outcomes of such an analysis using an earlier subset of the national sample data, see Anderson, M., ‘The emergence of the modern life cycle in Britain’, Social History, 10 1 (1985) 82–4.Google Scholar

²⁶ Computed from Census of England and Wales: household and family composition, table 20.

²⁷ For an extended discussion of this point see Anderson, M., ‘The social implications of demographic change’, in Thompson, F. M. L., ed., The Cambridge social history of Britain (Cambridge, 1988), 2Google Scholar, chap 1.

²⁸ P., Laslettet al., eds., Bastardy and its comparative history (London, 1980), 16–17.Google Scholar

²⁹ Cf. Robin, ‘Illegitimacy’, 335–6. Some important new findings on this point are emerging from work currently in progress by Rory Paddock of the University of Edinburgh.

³⁰ Wall, R., ‘The age at leaving home’, Journal of Family History 3, 2 (1978), 181–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wall, R., ‘Household formation in pre-industrial England’, Continuity and Change, 2, 1 (1987), 92–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar