Preface

Summary

A preface should certainly apologise and acknowledge, but it must also consider expectations, both the readers' and the author's. This is a demographic study written by a geographer. It describes and offers some interpretations of the course of demographic change in England and Wales during the Victorian era, 1837–1901. It is especially concerned with changes and variations in nuptiality, fertility and mortality, but it has relatively little to say directly on the subject of internal migration although it does devote a chapter to the consequences of urbanisation for the pattern of national mortality trends. There is no intention to make the study a comprehensive survey in which each demographic component receives equal attention. For example, childhood mortality is given an especially prominent place not only because of its interest to contemporaries especially in the early years of the twentieth century, but also because of its contribution to variations in life chances and its possible influence on reproductive behaviour. The book is not preoccupied exclusively with one period and place. The Victorian era, whilst being remarkable for the development of new statistical sources and for its position at the origin of several secular trends, cannot be treated in isolation. Much needs to be said about the early years of the nineteenth as well as the eighteenth century and the analysis will not be halted arbitrarily in 1901 or 1911.