Читать книгу The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain - Литагент HarperCollins USD - Страница 8

The population of Britain entered on its prolonged and still continuing period of sustained growth from the middle of the eighteenth century. It built up to its fastest rate of increase between 1811 and 1821, after which the pace slackened somewhat although remaining at historically high levels, before it turned decisively downwards from 1881. This deceleration had little effect in the short run on the economy, because the age structure of the population and slight variations in the proportion that the active labour force formed of the total population, or activity rate, were sufficient to ensure that the size of the labour force continued to increase at much the same rate throughout the seventy years after 1831, and indeed until the 1920s. Similarly, the braking effects upon the growth of total population of the demographic changes plainly discernible from 1881 did not bite hard for a further generation; it was only after 1911 that population increase slowed to its typical twentieth-century level of 5 per cent or less per decade, having previously been at or above 10 per cent per decade ever since the first census. Nevertheless, although they might be ripples which barely affected the surface of population aggregates for another thirty years or more, the changes which surfaced in the vital statistics of the 1880s were of profound social significance. These concerned birth rates and fertility, and the prolonged decline in both, which began at this time and continued without interruption until after the Second World War, signalled the appearance of what were to become characteristic features of modern industrial societies: family limitation and small families.

Ever since Arthur Young observed that ‘the increase of employment will be found to raise men like mushrooms’ and that ‘it is employment that creates population: marriages are early and numerous in proportion to the amount of employment’, it has often been supposed that British population growth was a response to the expansion of manufacturing in the later eighteenth century and a perception that large families could become an economic asset through widening openings for child labour. This is to take an unjustifiably insular view, since the transition from the centuries-old demographic regime of very little long-term growth punctuated by sudden and violent fluctuations, to sustained increase, occurred at much the same time in most of north-western Europe and most notably in Ireland, rural areas with little or no increase in industrial activity, just as it did in Britain. The contrary and much more widely held view is that population growth was the result of a very general reduction in mortality brought about by increased agricultural productivity, improvements in nutrition, and a decline in plague and smallpox. While allowing that such factors may have had some influence, it now seems, however, that the key change was a decline in the age at marriage, with earlier marriages resulting in more children and larger families. The earlier marriages were a response to general improvements in material conditions and prospects, particularly in the price and availability of food, rather than to any increase of opportunities specifically in industry; and probably to the increasing irrelevance, outside peasant circles, of inheritance expectations as incentives to delayed marriage. With these qualifications, Arthur Young may not have been so far wrong.

The age of women at marriage continued to fall until the middle of the nineteenth century, but the decline was small and with the mean age remaining around twenty-five marriage could still be considered late, both in relation to puberty and to late twentieth-century habits, where twenty-two has become the average age at which women marry. Of more importance for trends in fertility and in total population, marriage was becoming more frequent and popular until the 1870s. Significant numbers never married, so that in 1881 12 per cent of the women aged forty-five to fifty-four, in England, and 19 per cent in Scotland, had never married; but the proportion remaining unmarried had declined, in every age group over the age of fifteen, since the first available figures, for 1851 (teenage marriages, however, were extremely uncommon, at only 2 or 3 per cent of the age group). It was primarily these marriage patterns which sustained the crude birth rate at around 35 per thousand of total population throughout the forty years after 1840, when the figures for births under the civil registration instituted in 1837 become reliable, and raised the fertility rate of births per thousand women in the childbearing age group of fifteen to forty-four, from 135 in the early 1840s to its peak of 156 in the mid-1870s. This increase in fertility was almost entirely due to increased nuptiality, rather than to any rise in the number of children per marriage.

From 1878 both the crude birth rate and the fertility rate entered upon their prolonged decline, and by 1901 were down to 28.5 and 114 in England (remaining slightly higher in Scotland), a drop of about 25 per cent from the peak rates. The start of the twentieth century did not, of course, mark any particular milestone in these trends, which continued on their downward course until more or less stabilized at new low levels reflecting the reproductive behaviour of late industrial or post-industrial society in the second half of the twentieth century. The social mechanisms producing these trends did, however, undergo a radical reversal, if not immediately after 1901 then after 1914, and this subsequent change was sufficiently radical to mark off the years between 1878 and 1914 (or, as these were the nearest census dates, between 1881 and 1911) as a highly distinctive phase in the marital behaviour of a fully industrialized society.

It is frequently thought that the fall in fertility from the 1880s was the result of a general and growing adoption of birth-control practices amongst most classes in the community, and there is indeed plenty of evidence that contraception became more openly talked about and knowledge of methods became more widespread from this time. More traditional mechanisms were at work, however, although in non-traditional directions. The age of women at marriage began to rise from its low point in 1871 and by 1901 was over twenty-six years, the increase of a full year in the average age signifying a major shift comparable in magnitude to any pre-nineteenth-century changes within a similar period of time. At the same time marriage became less frequent, the proportion of women who never married rising to nearly 14 per cent by 1901 and 16 per cent by 1911 in England, and 20 per cent in Scotland. Such tendencies were perverse, in the sense that real incomes were rising fast for most of this period, and that the overall sex ratio in the population was moving in women’s favour with the numbers of males per thousand females rising, circumstances which in earlier times would have led to earlier and more frequent marriages. They were, moreover, peculiar to the late Victorian and Edwardian world, for since 1914 there has been a striking increase in the amount of marriage, as marriage rates have risen and marriages have become more and more youthful. The marital posture of the country at large in this late Victorian period was, therefore, decidedly odd in the light of the normal habits and preferences of earlier and later times. Granted that Britain only gradually matured into an industrial society, a process scarcely completed before the 1880s, and granted that it generally took a generation for patterns of individual behaviour to adjust to broad shifts in economic circumstances, it may well be that this apparent peculiarity of later marriages and increasing celibacy was society’s collective response to industrialization.

This is distinctly paradoxical, when it is considered that Irish society responded with more emphatic versions of the same marital trends to the precisely opposite situation, the absence of industrialization. When Famine signalled that the population had gravely outrun the resources available to sustain it, a balance was restored in predominantly agricultural Ireland, first by the grim check of starvation, and subsequently in part by mass emigration, and in part by a steep fall in the marriage rate and rise in the age at marriage, with the numbers of children within families restrained only by this last factor. Emigration plus the swelling ranks of unmarried Irish abruptly halved the total population of Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century, and stabilized it at a new, low, level more suited to the capacities of its non-industrial economy. The Irish logic was the traditional logic of making marriages and families fit the available means of subsistence. The British logic was a new logic of rising material expectations and of a society in which only a small minority was directly dependent on producing food; delayed marriage or no marriage at all were the end results of individual pursuit of better conditions and larger shares of goods and services, a strategy well suited to a time when the technical means of controlling births, and thus enlarging personal freedom and choice in making families, were still extremely limited.

This interpretation of the great tidal waves in family history which are expressed in the ups and downs of marriage will acquire many qualifications as the analysis develops. But insofar as decisions whether and when to marry were rational, and matters of calculation, it made sense to pursue the maintenance and improvement of standards of living by postponing marriage, reducing the number of children to be supported, and reducing the rate at which new families and households were formed. The development and widespread dissemination of reliable contraceptive techniques in the twentieth century, it can be argued, liberated people from dependence on these preventive checks and enabled them to pursue the same ends of improving their lot while indulging in as much marriage at as early stages as individuals happened to prefer. Confirmation of the technologically intermediate basis of the late Victorian behaviour is provided by the observation that delayed marriages and rising celibacy were sufficient to account for approximately half of the decline in fertility between 1871 and 1911; the other half was the result of birth control. More and earlier marriages in the half century after 1911, by contrast, would have raised fertility by at least 50 per cent if even the already shrunken family sizes of the early 1900s had remained normal; instead, fertility actually declined by half, a decline entirely attributable to the increasing efficiency and popularity of family limitation.

The late Victorians were, therefore, practising family limitation on a scale that made a marked, although not an exclusive, impression on the figures of births. They were not doing it, however, through a wholesale donning of rubber sheaths. The condom, generally made from animal intestines on the sausage-skin principle, had indeed been known since at least the early eighteenth century, the ‘English overcoat’ or ‘armour’ being used by upper-class men as a prophylactic against venereal disease rather than as a contraceptive. The successful substitution of rubber for skin was accomplished in the 1870s, by the 1890s there were several firms supplying the market, with the makers of Durex already well established, and barbers’ shops had emerged as the main retail outlets. Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear from contemporary accounts that the limitation of conceptions within working-class marriages, whatever may have been the case among the upper classes, was not achieved by sheathing, although the slight fall in illegitimacy at this period may have owed something to this. Still less were the variety of sponges, douches, syringes, and pessaries responsible for the result, although they were fairly widely, if surreptitiously, advertised and were certainly available commercially. It was the First World War which familiarized almost an entire generation of young men with rubber sheaths, as they were used, or at least distributed, on a massive scale by the army in an effort to check venereal disease; hence perhaps the entry of French letters into common usage. Before this the great majority of married couples, even if they had information about contraceptives, found them either too expensive or too complicated. They relied on withdrawal, abstinence, or possibly prolonged breastfeeding which was thought to inhibit conception. The concept of the safe period was also current in rather restricted circles, but since the medical men were disastrously mistaken in the advice which they gave, pinpointing quite the wrong time in the menstrual cycle, it made no difference if this information was not widely disseminated.

The trouble with natural methods, apart from that of protracted suckling, was that they depended on male decisions and male self-discipline and control at the moment of maximum sexual excitement, and were inherently accident-prone. Despite the well-attested prevalence of coitus interruptus as the most widely practised form of birth control it is, therefore, a shade unlikely that it was sufficient to account for the extent of family limitation which was actually attained, with family size declining from about six for couples married in the decade of the 1860s to about four for the 1900 cohort. It seems highly likely that abstinence as well as withdrawal had been at work, and although the bedroom is a largely unrecorded area, the inference is that there was less sexual activity within late Victorian marriages than within earlier ones, which is odd if prudery and inhibition are thought of as essentially mid-Victorian attitudes. The trouble with coitus interruptus, for the social historian, is that it was not some newly discovered technique of the late nineteenth century but was a highly traditional method of attempting to limit pregnancies or control birth intervals, which had been used by some couples at all levels of society virtually from time immemorial. The problem then is to explain why a tried – but not necessarily completely proven – technique which had always been available should have been adopted on an apparently very general scale at this particular time rather than any sooner. Clearly what happened was not so much the enlargement of the range of personal choices, as a change in the direction of the social choices of large groups of people.

A social diffusion model has found much favour, in which smaller family sizes were pioneered by the upper class, were subsequently adopted by the middle classes, and eventually percolated down to the working classes, a model which fits snugly into more general concepts of social change as a process in which changes spread downwards from the top to the bottom of society by imitation and emulation. There is indeed good evidence that the British aristocracy, from the sixteenth century at least, consistently went in for smaller family sizes than did the generality of the population, and that these began to contract from about the 1830s, a good generation in advance of the rest. Thus the average aristocratic family was down to four children in the third quarter of the nineteenth century from its high mark of five children fifty years earlier, at a time when six children was the national average; a steep fall in aristocratic family size, however, did not set in until after 1875, at much the same time as the general decline. The persistently lower levels at which aristocratic families operated were the outcome of later and less frequent marriages, which can be explained by the importance of property questions in marriage arrangements and by the reluctance of many to marry beneath themselves in the social scale. Eldest sons almost invariably did marry, in order to continue the line and because they could readily attract women who were both their social equals and were backed by satisfactory marriage portions. Younger sons, however, might find it difficult or impossible to make such good matches, or to live at the standards to which they had been brought up in childhood, and might thus tend to stay single, thereby depriving a similar number of aristocratic daughters of eligible marriage partners and obliging them, on the social parity principle, to remain spinsters. The smaller family sizes were also, in part, the result of family limitation, and this appears to have been more practised with increasing effect from about the mid-1820s onwards. This could well have been a lagged response to the decline in child mortality which had set in some thirty to fifty years before, since it would have become obvious that the chances of children surviving to maturity had risen markedly and that it had become necessary to have fewer babies in order to achieve a target number of grown-up children, and prudent to do so to avoid the mounting costs and responsibilities of supporting larger families of survivors. The decline in child mortality may well have included a fall in infant mortality, although that cannot be separately measured; the growing unfashionability of putting aristocratic babies out to wet nurses would certainly have produced such a fall. Most of the decline, however, was probably due to better child care, improving nutrition, and better home conditions, all matters in which aristocratic resources were clearly likely to put them comfortably ahead of the masses. Further, such material improvements could well have been accompanied by, and indeed have helped to foster, a change in parental sentiments leading to growing attachment to each individual child and hence to a more caring, and careful, kind of parenthood.

There are clear suggestions, although no hard statistical proof, that the urban middle classes were beginning to follow suit in the 1850s and 1860s. It could even be that the middle classes had for long had families that were small in relation to the national average, and conceivably smaller than those of the aristocracy. One strand in middle-class opinion which was already well established by the 1830s, after all, was a puritanical disapproval of aristocratic extravagance, indulgence, frivolity, and excess. This was openly expressed by criticism of luxurious and improvident styles of living, and of moral laxity in sexual behaviour; but it is not impossible that this contained an unspoken criticism of improvidence in the begetting of children, with the implication that the middle-class critics behaved differently. The improvident marriages which were loudly condemned, however, were those of the labouring classes. The thrust of the Malthusian case on the pressure of increasing numbers of mouths upon the means of subsistence, leading inexorably to growing impoverishment, was directed at imprudent and youthful marriages of the poor which produced insupportably and undesirably large families. Criticism of the system of poor relief, which was held to encourage such imprudent marriages by subsidizing them at the ratepayers’ expense, was a well-publicized special application of this view in the run-up to the reform of the Poor Law in 1834. The validity of the case is one thing, and it has been demolished by historical research; but those who held these views were presumably satisfied that they themselves were not guilty of imprudence in their own family affairs. The middle classes had, indeed, every reason to exercise moral restraint in delaying their own marriages until the bridegroom was sufficiently established in his career to be able to afford to keep a wife and family in the style considered suitable to his station in society. That this was the ideal to aim at was taken for granted in guidance literature and fiction alike, and was presumably largely observed in practice.

The postponement of marriage by middle-class men to their late twenties or early thirties did not necessarily affect the ultimate size of their families, although the delay is commonly held responsible for the Victorian’s ‘double standard’ which connived at or even stimulated the sexual activities of bachelors while insisting on chastity for unmarried women. Other things being equal, the number of children born in a marriage depended on the age of the wife at marriage; the husband’s age, provided let us say he was under fifty when he started, made little difference. Given that middle-class daughters were brought up to regard marriage and motherhood as their main purpose in life – although generally kept in ignorance of the mechanics of procreation – there was nothing in their upbringing to suggest that they, or their parents, had a duty to exercise restraint by delaying marriage, unless sexual ignorance and fears of childbirth may have nourished anxiety to postpone the start of the long haul of childbearing. Middle-class standards, in other words, may simply have led to an unusually large difference between the ages of husbands and wives, with women starting married life at much the same age as in any other section of society. There are, unfortunately, no studies and no statistics of any of the particular social groups – apart from the peerage – which go to make up the national averages. On the other hand, the prudence which made middle-class men feel they were too poor or insecure to marry until they had reached some target level of income and independence, must also have made them feel too poor to support in acceptable style the indefinite, or very large, number of children with which God was all too likely to bless a very young wife.

It is, therefore, entirely possible that normal middle-class patterns were for above average ages at marriage for both sexes, which would have given them below average sized families. Another possibility is that middle-class intercourse was infrequent: male abstinence or weakness of sex drives, or female adroitness in rebuffing or avoiding encounters, would not have been inconsistent with prevalent evangelical attitudes to carnal pleasures, indeed pretences that sex was not pleasurable at all, however hard it may be to believe that intimate private practice did not render such attitudes mere public hypocrisy. A third possibility is deliciously ironic. Middle-class couples may have been practising family limitation within marriage, by coitus interruptus or otherwise, at the very time in the 1820s and 1830s that middle-class, and clerical, opinion was vehemently denouncing radical campaigns for birth control among the working classes, in the name of public decency and morals.

It is thus plausible to speculate that middle-class fertility and family sizes were already functioning on a comparatively low level, for a variety of social and economic reasons, before demographic evidence begins to surface that shows they were on a declining trend from the 1860s. This evidence, mainly from the first census of fertility taken in 1911, which recorded information by social and occupational classes from all women then living, supplemented by a few studies using mid-Victorian census enumerators’ books, indicates that middle-class family size had fallen to about 2.8 children by 1911 and had virtually closed any earlier gap there may have been between them and the upper class, since aristocratic families were only slightly smaller, at 2.5 children. Beatrice Webb has been cited as a dramatic illustration of the experience of the late Victorian generation of the wealthy middle classes: born in 1862 as one of the ten children of an industrialist and railway director, her marriage to Sidney in 1892, though it lasted over fifty years, was childless – whether by design or from infertility is not known. A less ambiguous illustration of upper-middle-class habits, if Oswald Mosley’s account is to be trusted, is provided by Margot Asquith, who married in 1894 and had two children (and three stillborn): when she visited Mosley’s wife Cynthia after she had had her first baby, Margot is said to have advised, ‘Dear child, you look very pale and must not have another baby for a long time. Henry always withdrew in time, such a noble man.’ More expertly in bed than in politics, perhaps.

In restricting their families the middle classes were responding to their generally growing prosperity, punctuated by short periods such as in the 1880s when they may have felt retrenchment necessary to cope with economic pressures, and to a fall in child mortality starting in the mid-Victorian years. In brief, middle-class lifestyles were becoming more costly and ambitious, and it seemed more and more desirable to shift family expenditure away from numerous children and towards other things. The central place of domesticity and the family home in middle-class culture in itself implied a larger call on incomes than had previously been devoted to residential needs, and although this central place had already been marked out by the 1830s, the growing availability of creature comforts and domestic conveniences from mid-century – from more elaborate and differentiated furniture and furnishings to bathrooms, from gas lights to family photographs – and the growing attachment to them for reasons of personal comfort or social status, undoubtedly generated insistent pressures for more expenditure on housing and the home. Servant-keeping, a universal middle-class aspiration if not a universally accomplished fact, became more expensive, until by the end of the century domestic servants were probably among the highest paid female workers in the country. Above all, perhaps, the cost of educating middle-class children was increasing, particularly as competitive parental ambition for their children pushed them towards more expensive schools and longer schooling.

The costs of respectability were rising, and one obvious way of affording them was through smaller families. Multiplication of the methods available for achieving smaller families, and wider dissemination of knowledge about them, were occurring at much the same time as the decline in middle-class family sizes; but this coincidence in timing should not be taken as establishing cause and effect. Religious teaching, which consistently held that procreation was the purpose and justification of sexual intercourse and the chief purpose of marriage itself, and that efforts to avoid conception were immoral and sinful, was indeed being weakened at this time both by the self-doubts within the Church over Darwin and by the challenge of the agnosticism or atheism of secularists. The specific birth-control propaganda of the neo-Malthusian secularists, kept alive by George Drysdale in the 1850s with his advocacy of ‘preventive sexual intercourse’ in which ‘precautions are used to prevent impregnation [so that] love would be obtained, without entailing upon us the want of food and leisure, by overcrowding the population’, and by the National Reformer journal in the 1860s, blossomed after the publicity of the Annie Besant – Charles Bradlaugh trial for indecency – for distributing birth-control tracts – and the foundation of the Malthusian Society, in 1877. The championing of women’s rights which had previously been the preserve of a tiny minority easily portrayed as extremist, eccentric, or subversive adherents of Mary Wollstonecraft or Robert Owen, became several shades more respectable when John Stuart Mill cautiously argued in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), and more decidedly in The Subjection of Women (1869), that women should have the same rights as men, and should be relieved of the physical suffering and intolerable privation and drudgery of excessive childbearing. A more direct impact on the ruling class was made by Josephine Butler and her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864 and 1866, which empowered the police to arrest, examine, and regulate suspected prostitutes in specified garrison towns. Her fight, carried on in the name of rights of women to freedom from capricious arrest and to control of their own persons, rather than in the cause of purity and against state-licensed vice, was constantly before the public from 1870 until the suspension of the Acts in 1883; although it was not a campaign about birth control, it was one with obvious connections with the emancipation of women, sex, and women’s control of their own sexual lives.

None of these activists, however, whether secularists, family planners, or feminists, were in the least likely to have made any impression on the country’s birth statistics or on those middle-class circles and middle-class wives among whom family limitation was first practised. The activists were educated men and women in reasonably comfortable circumstances, but they were consciously uttering extremely unconventional and heretical views out of a strong sense of intellectual and moral conviction, views which effectively excluded them from membership of conventional society or acceptance by the majority of their social class. The pioneers of family limitation, on the other hand, were families at the very heart of upper-middle-class Victorian society, guardians of respectability who by no stretch of the imagination could have been the first to succumb to avant-garde influences. They were the families of army and naval officers, accountants, doctors, civil engineers, solicitors, and the non-Anglican ministers. Only the authors and journalists, artists and sculptors, and tobacconists, could be considered outside the pale of unimpeachable respectability – on the ground of association with Bohemian habits, or with trade – among all the groups whose completed family sizes were below the average for the social class to which they belonged (the Registrar-General’s Class I, the upper and upper middle class, for all except the aberrant tobacconists) for all marriages from pre-1861 unions onwards. By the same token, the French letters which a French observer found on sale in Petticoat Lane a little later, in 1883, ‘avec le portrait du ministre Gladstone ou de la reine Victoria’ were not likely to have appealed to these solid family men: they would be, presumably, for the young Conservative or republican market, no doubt mainly aristocratic and wholly unmarried.

The strong probability is that the wives in these upper-middle-class families remained unemancipated, strong or at least unrebellious believers in the dutiful and subordinate role to which their upbringing had conditioned them, and that the initiative in family limitation came from their husbands; or, since the degree of male dominance in Victorian middle-class life may well be exaggerated in the conventional stereotype, that the adoption of family limitation was a strategy discussed and mutually agreed by wife and husband. What does seem certain is that it was not the consequence of any unilateral drive for independence on the part of wives resolved to free themselves from the trials and burdens of unending pregnancies. It is not certain that the particular uppermiddle-class groups which have been specified were in fact the only ones to begin limiting their families from at least the 1850s, since when the Registrar-General placed individual occupational groups into social classes from the 1911 returns he could only draw on occupational information to construct social classifications. It so happened that only some occupations, chiefly in the professions, could be assumed to be wholly middle- or upper-middle-class; other members of the middle class, for instance cotton manufacturers or ironmasters, were returned for census purposes in the industrial grouping to which they belonged and hence could not be distinguished in the fertility survey from the generality of textile workers or ironworkers. Partial information about some groups of businessmen that can be isolated in the census returns does, however, suggest that the commercial and industrial middle classes may indeed have embarked on family limitation distinctly later than the professional groups. Thus, the upper-middle-class groups who entered the band before 1871 were all still from the professions: barristers, Anglican clergy, and those ‘engaged in scientific pursuits’. Those who joined before 1881, however, included bankers, merchants (commodity unspecified), chemists and druggists, who were clearly in the commercial world, as well as dentists, architects, teachers, and law clerks, who were the professional laggards. Colliery owners, moreover, were ten to twenty years behind all these other middle-class groups in opting for smaller families, and at the end of the Victorian period still had larger families than considerable sections of the working classes.

The prominence of the professions in opting for smaller families suggests very strongly that there were some influences or circumstances peculiar to that group in society, or at least impressing them sooner and more insistently than other sections of the middle classes. It might be that some change in cultural or sentimental values or attitudes began to sweep through the professional class in the 1850s, but with the example of Victoria and her nine children before their eyes, and with the cult of the family in its domesticity reaching its height, this appears most improbable. It is more likely that the pursuit of economically rational behaviour was the dominant influence, and the professions as a group can certainly be assumed to have mustered sufficient intelligence to identify the rational course to take. There are no grounds for supposing that they experienced the rising costs of prosperity, in terms of home comforts and luxuries, any earlier or more insistently than any other middle-class groups with similar income levels. It is very possible, on the other hand, that the professional class were more affected, and affected earlier, than other groups by the rising cost of educating their children. Not only were professional men likely to set a high value on a good education, but also if they were keen on their sons following in their footsteps, as so many in fact did, they were excellently placed to know what kind of education or training was currently appropriate for entering their own profession. The decline of ‘Old Corruption’ and its final dismemberment in the 1830s and 1840s removed the traditional route of patronage and favour as the way forward in the professions – more obviously in some, like the Church, the law, and perhaps medicine, than in others such as the army or the civil service – and more formal and more prolonged education began to be substituted as the avenue of entry. In some cases that meant staying longer at more expensive schools, or going on to university, in others it meant taking articles which had to be paid for and which yielded little or no income for the trainee; in either case the cost of launching a son into an acceptable career had increased. It is, moreover, apparent that businessmen who contemplated having their sons follow them in the family firm did not favour such prolonged or expensive schooling; they did not become patrons of the public schools much before the 1890s, and their sons generally went into business at the age of sixteen or seventeen to learn on the job. The nine ancient public schools, those investigated by the Clarendon Commission in 1864, probably remained very much the preserve of the aristocracy and gentry and were not much penetrated by the sons of professional men. But the great crop of new public schools founded or radically reconstructed from grammar school origins between 1840 and 1870, for example Cheltenham, Clifton, Marlborough, or Radley, of which there were at least thirty altogether, catered primarily for the sons of the professional class. The total cost of educating a son and fitting him to enter a profession was of the order of £1500 to £2000, spread over perhaps ten years; with an outlay of that size in prospect it would be most understandable if parents developed a desire to restrict the number of their children to that which they could afford to educate adequately.

It is true that secondary education for girls, a truly revolutionary departure, made its appearance only a little later, with the North London Collegiate (day school) and Cheltenham Ladies’ College (boarding school) in the early 1850s, both of which had the daughters of professional families much in mind. The growth of girls’ public schools thereafter, however, was gradual rather than spectacular; Woodard, for instance, began his scheme for studding the country with strict Anglican public schools for boys with Lancing in the late 1840s, but did not move into public schools for girls until the 1860s. It was not until the 1880s and 1890s that there was anything like a rush of foundations of girls’ high schools and boarding schools, and until then it is a fair presumption that expensive secondary education for their daughters remained a decidedly secondary consideration with even upper-middle-class parents. Education-based family limitation, therefore, at least in its initial forty to fifty years, was most likely aimed at limiting the number of sons whose future prospects it was desired to maximize, and one would expect professional-class parents to go on having children until a desired number of sons had appeared, a strategy which could well have led to wide variations in the size of families between couples who shared the same family-limitation objectives. This could also help to explain why family sizes, which still remained at over four children for the pioneering professional groups until the 1880s, plunged down to a little over two by 1911, as more equal treatment for the two sexes became more widespread, educationally.

There is little in all this to suggest that the upper middle class was following, after a time lag, the aristocratic example. It is true that some of these groups, especially the army, Church, and law, lived on the fringes of aristocratic society and were prone to seek to emulate aristocratic lifestyles in such matters as servant-keeping and domestic apparatus, as closely as possible. But since the expense of such things does not appear to have been the dominant motive in professional-class family limitation, it cannot have acted as the link in any social diffusion chain. Moreover the educational factor was distinctive to the professional classes, and was not strongly felt by the aristocracy who had long been accustomed to spending rather heavily on the education of their sons and to a lesser degree of their daughters, at least since the early eighteenth century and probably since the sixteenth. As to aristocratic behaviour rendering family limitation respectable, so that the upper middle class then felt free to adopt it themselves without risk of censure, not only is there no evidence that the subject was referred to or commented on by respectable people, but also a section at least of the upper middle class would not have accepted aristocratic behaviour as any guide to respectability. It is more sensible to conclude that the upper middle class had their own good reasons for embarking on restriction of family size, were responding independently to their own circumstances and needs, and were not emulating the class above them.

The rest of the middle classes started to restrict their family sizes from the 1880s, and it is not altogether clear whether they were copying the earlier examples of their social equals, responding to the general movement in educated opinion, or adapting to the arrival in their particular groups of circumstances similar to those which had begun to affect groups in the professions thirty or more years before. Possibly a mixture of the three, with most influence coming from the third factor. Manufacturers and industrialists, as noted earlier, were impossible to identify separately in the census returns; but a family survey carried out privately by Charles Ansell in 1874, a postal questionnaire answered by over 25,000 clergy, lawyers, doctors, merchants, bankers, manufacturers, and peers, showed that the merchants, bankers, and manufacturers had larger completed families than the other groups. Insofar as the merchants and bankers had fallen into line with the professional families by the 1890s, it is not unlikely that the manufacturers had done so as well. It is perhaps excessively determinist to suggest that civil servants, whose families declined sharply in size with marriages made after 1871, responded instantly to the opening of the civil service to competitive examinations in 1870, since that would assume that civil servants hoped to breed future civil servants and began at once to tailor the number of their children to the more elaborate and advanced education which had implicitly been made necessary. Nevertheless, education-triggered family limitation applies as well to them as it does to manufacturers, whose ambitions for gentility for their offspring and more prolonged and modern education were supplying more public schoolboys by the 1890s. The very rapidly growing core of the lower middle class, the commercial clerks, were already restricting their families in all post-1861 marriages and from 1871 onwards their families were only fractionally larger than the upper-middle-class mean; yet these were miles away from being customers of the public schools. The clerks formed one of the fastest growing occupational groups of the second half of the nineteenth century, male clerks quadrupling in number between 1861 and 1891, from 91,000 to 370,000, and female clerks making an appearance from 1881 onwards. This expansion was sustained only by massive recruitment from other, largely manual working-class, groups, and the essential qualifications for entry were literacy, good handwriting, accuracy, and respectability. Recruitment was, therefore, likely to attract the working-class children from the top of the class who had performed best and benefited most from their schooling, and were likely to put a high value on getting as good a schooling as possible for their own children in turn. Moreover, clerks distanced themselves from those they regarded as their social inferiors less by any income differences, since they earned scarcely as much as many skilled workers, than by careful cultivation of status differences expressive of moral superiority, which in their own estimation included shunning public elementary or Board schools for their children and sending them to local private, fee-paying, schools. Here, at a lower level of incomes and standards, was the same category of motives for having fewer children.

The clerks could well have added that it was important to their social self-esteem to make it clear that they were different from the working classes who bred like rabbits, and that far from there being any question of emulating their superiors they were engaged in underlining contrasts with their inferiors. The working classes, however, were far from homogeneous in their family habits; they were not all big breeders; and it is more than doubtful if they were in the business of emulating the middle classes themselves. Although unreflecting and vulgar Malthusians had spoken as though the lower orders were an undifferentiated, uneducated, and unbridled mass, heedlessly indulging in imprudently youthful marriages and insupportably large families, it is fairly obvious that there always had been different groups within the working classes, with different attitudes towards marriage and children. The apprenticeship system in the traditional skilled trades had always been regarded as a check upon headlong breeding, since the rules stipulated that an apprentice might not marry until he had served his term, normally seven years. The decay and erosion of the apprenticeship system has often been cited as a factor stimulating population increase in the eighteenth century, via earlier marriages. On the other hand, while formal and enforceable apprenticeship may have been withering, the enforcement of effective substitutes continued to be a prime aim of the trade societies not merely in the older crafts but also in the new skilled occupations generated by industrialization. Insofar as boilermakers or engine-makers were successful in controlling entry into their trades through monitoring the flow of trainees, and older trades such as those of compositors or masons succeeded in maintaining their traditional practices, similar effects in restraining early marriages might have been expected to continue. In any case, the skilled tradesmen of the labour aristocracy had powerful motives of self-respect and status-protection, quite aside from any possible sexual or marital frustrations imposed by their training conditions, for wishing to confine their families to sizes which they could afford to support in respectable conditions. The difficulty is that the earliest firm foundation for observations on family sizes, the 1911 fertility census, does not give clear support to any such simple explanation and classification in terms of economically and socially rational behaviour.

The situation reached by 1911 was, indeed, one of apparently orderly and rational progression in average family sizes in a league table of working-class occupational groups that ran from the textile workers with the smallest families of 3.19 children to the miners with the largest, 4.33 children, the intermediate steps being occupied, in ascending order, by skilled workers, semi-skilled workers, unskilled workers, and agricultural labourers. It has been readily assumed that this hierarchy was not a recent development, but reflected differential behaviour that had long been established. In particular, it has been inferred from the 1911 position that textile workers were the pioneers among the working classes in family planning, and explanations of behaviour patterns have been focused upon them, and upon the opposite extreme, the miners. Before becoming unduly impressed by circumstantial evidence drawn from the 1830s and 1840s – that textile workers were exceptionally exposed to birth-control literature and ideas and exceptionally responsive to them because of their distinctive employment patterns – it is however as well to reflect on the prehistory of family limitation in specific occupational groups which is revealed by the 1911 census. This shows that for pre-1861 marriages, whose couples were still living in 1911 (a sample biased by above-average longevity), the largest families of around eight or more children were indeed produced by coalminers and agricultural labourers, but masons and boilermakers were within a decimal point or so of producing the same number of children. Similarly, the smallest families were those of spinners and weavers in the woollen and worsted industries, of six and 6.86 children; but their comparative, although not outstanding, frugality was matched by other groups with fewer than seven children, domestic gardeners, domestic indoor servants, and railway signalmen and porters. The families of cotton spinners and weavers of this vintage, often regarded as in the vanguard of liberation or depravity – depending on how family limitation was regarded – were in fact of middling size, around 7.5 children. There was nothing to distinguish them, in this respect, from many other working-class groups, ranging from printers and compositors through railway guards and railway labourers to dock labourers; they were exceedingly average couples in their reproductive performance.

Mine owners and managers, as well as miners, had families of more than eight children in the mid-Victorian years during which the children of these pre-1861 marriages were being born. So also did butchers and master builders. There was, therefore, nothing peculiarly working-class about large families, even if it had already become rather peculiar for groups with middle-class status or pretensions to breed to this extent. It is indeed probable that an average score of something like eight children born alive was the normal tally for families regardless of social class or occupation, until particular and differential influences began to operate to encourage limitation. The average, of course, embraced individual families running up to twelve or thirteen children as well as childless couples; and it included all children born alive, so that infant and child mortality with their differing impact on different classes winnowed down the number of children who survived into their teens in proportions that were not socially uniform. Nevertheless, it is wildly improbable that colliery managers or butchers, coalminers or textile workers, had the remotest idea of the relative risks they might face from infant and child mortality, and implausible to imagine that they thought of controlling the number of their conceptions with a view to ending up with some target number of grown-up children. On the contrary, it is likely that pregnancies were allowed to happen as they listed, until such time as motives for trying to limit pregnancies became insistent.

Occupational distinctions do not point to any single, simple explanation for those motives becoming insistent when they did in different sections of the working classes. The vanguard in the move to smaller families included most railwaymen, but not the engine drivers; most domestic servants, but not gamekeepers; most textile workers, but not cotton spinners; printers and compositors, but not cabinet-makers. It is difficult to see what these groups had in common. It is easier to observe that the groups which started later but had caught up by the 1880s – engine drivers, fitters and erectors, cabinet-makers, and shoemakers – were predominantly skilled workers, although this observation tends to undermine any notion that skilled workers had always been predisposed to restraint on grounds of preservation of their superior status and job-training constraints on early marriage. It is also easy to see that those who were still producing comparatively large families right up to the end of the nineteenth century, of more than five children – and in the case of coalminers, more than six – were mainly those engaged in heavy manual labour. They were agricultural labourers, builders’ labourers, dock workers, and of course, the coalminers themselves. But gamekeepers, boilermakers, and masons were in the same league clinging to large families for longer than the rest of society, and these were clearly not occupations characterized by lack of education or skill.

If this varied and complex pattern of behaviour was the result of rational decisions by thousands of parents, and if their decisions were primarily influenced by some ingredients of their economic circumstances, then the one thread linking the great majority of these occupational groups was the extent, and timing, of their exposure to the processes of industrialization. Thus, machine technologies, large-scale organization, or factory methods, came earliest to textiles, railways, or printing; much later to furniture-and shoemaking; and not at all to building, dock, and farm work, and in the sense that coalmining remained essentially a labour-intensive industry using traditional methods, not to that industry either. Such a model cannot accommodate the exceptions, the engine drivers who were not among the early starters on family limitation, and the boilermakers who remained out of kilter with their large families; but the exceptions are not numerous. It could be that engine drivers, the cream of railway workers, felt that they could afford larger families than the rest of their industry, and that boilermakers responded in similar fashion to their high pay and status among the generality of engineering workers.

The low-scoring and high-achieving domestic servants are the apparently awkward exception to an explanation framed in terms of the influences of industrialization on family life. Domestic servants, however, have been cast in a central role in the general process of ‘modernization’, a conveniently vague concept intended to sum up the whole shift from traditional, rural and agricultural, customs and lives to modern urban living, without implying that industrialization in any narrow sense was necessarily the chief or only motor in the process. Domestic service was indeed a very important and busy highway for shifting country girls and farm girls into the big city and giving them a view from below stairs of the habits of middle-class households, and a slice of urban living on afternoons off. It is conceivable, but not probable, that female domestics, especially ladies’ maids, not only observed the results of family limitation by their employers but also learnt the secrets of the techniques from their mistresses; in this way they could have acted as an important channel for the diffusion and emulation of middle-class habits and attitudes among the generality of the working classes, particularly as they tended to marry respectable town-dwelling workingmen and not dockers, miners, or farmworkers. Given the extreme reticence of Victorian middle-class women, however, who could scarcely bring themselves to mention sex to their own daughters, it is rather absurd to imagine mistresses chatting to their maids about birth control. It would be more plausible to suppose that young female servants, almost daily faced with seduction by their employers or the sons of the house according to popular literature, were obliged to work out for themselves some sex knowledge and contraceptive methods as an essential part of job- and character-preservation.

Leaving specific experience and skills acquired on the job to one side, it is very likely that domestic service inculcated general notions of prudent and careful management, which would be applied to the conduct of their own lives when servants left to get married. A reputation for knowledgeable and competent household management, plus a nest-egg of savings, were after all commonly held to be the major attractions which domestic servants brought into the marriage market. It would not be surprising if, as wives and mothers, ex-domestic servants applied principles of prudence and domestic economy to their own childbearing. How widely ex-domestics diffused such attitudes among the working classes can only be surmised, since there are no records on which to base any conclusions about the occupations of their husbands. Most girls who were in service for some part of their lives did eventually get married, probably at least 80 per cent of them, although they tended to be slightly older at marriage than other women and this in itself would tend to have limited the number of children they had. Very few married male servants and remained in domestic service, because the openings for married couples in service were limited. Since something like one in seven or one in eight of all females over ten years old were domestic servants throughout the Victorian period, they presumably provided about the same proportion of working-class wives and mothers; and although female servants were thought to have strong predilections for marrying shopkeepers and skilled tradesmen, if only because those were the groups with whom they came into contact most in the course of their duties, it seems likely that the sheer pressure of their numbers meant that many married outside those circles. They could, therefore, have been a most powerful agency in spreading attitudes, or a ‘mentality’, in which family limitation formed a natural part, although it must be emphasized that it is far from clear that such attitudes were absorbed from their middle-class employers rather than being self-generated.

The domestic servants whose small families were recorded in the 1911 fertility census were, of course, male servants, since all the occupational information concerned husbands’ occupation, it being thought of no importance, or impossible, to seek information on the wives’ previous or continuing occupation. Male servants who married and managed to remain in service, some of them for over fifty years by the time of the 1911 census, were a somewhat special and peculiar subcategory of servants since the opportunities for their employment were very restricted. Servants such as coachmen, grooms, or gardeners were indeed frequently married men; but they normally lived away from the house in their own separate quarters, and were not ranked as indoor servants. It is the indoor male domestic servants who turned in a better family-limitation performance than the upper and middle classes, or at any rate had fewer children. The reason may well have been that these were upper servants of some distinction and special value to their employers – stewards, butlers, chefs, or specially trusted manservants – who were given the privilege of being retained after marriage. Such special male servants would tend to marry late, and would be well aware that if they wanted to keep their jobs they could not afford to have many children, since both space in the house and tolerance for nursery noise would be strictly limited. Alternatively, only those married male servants who turned out to have small families, for whatever cause, might have contrived to remain in service, the large-family men being forced out into other occupations. Either way, the male servants cannot have been important agents of ‘modernization’, and their small families were a consequence of peculiar occupational requirements rather than of the influences of industrialization or urbanization.

There was a widespread feeling among contemporary observers of the early Victorian scene, especially among critics of the factory system, that the influences of industrialization were most strongly at work among textile, particularly cotton, workers, and that they were deplorable, immoral, unnatural, and subversive of the social order. The sight of women and girls working in the mills, as well as children, was found particularly shocking and offensive, the more so when it led to a reversal of gender roles, with the man doing the housework and child-minding while the wife toiled in the factory. Friedrich Engels saw in this not just class oppression and exploitation, but the approaching end of the natural order of the sexes, the dethronement and humiliation of men. ‘One can imagine’, he wrote, ‘what righteous indignation this virtual castration calls forth amongst the workers and what reversal of all family relations results from it, while all other social relationships remain unchanged.’ Whether achieved by castration or not, it was widely believed that the millgirls produced fewer children than other women. Mill work in childhood and adolescence was held to arrest and distort physical development, impairing the fecundity of the women or making them sterile. There is no evidence that the millgirls who were young in the 1830s and 1840s were not producing perfectly normal numbers of children in the 1850s, and no reason to suppose that childless couples were any more common in Lancashire textile towns than elsewhere. Married women working in the mills were thought to raise fewer children than normal, because they worked until the final stages of pregnancy and because they returned to work within two or three weeks of childbirth, damaging their own health and leaving tiny babies to neglect and probable swift death. This, if it had been true, might not have affected the demographer’s concept of completed family size, since that measures the total number of children born alive to a couple; but it would have affected the effective family size of children surviving beyond the age of one. In any case, there was little substance for such alarmist beliefs. Married women formed a small proportion of the female cotton workers, between a fifth and a quarter, and the great majority of these factory wives were either those who had not yet had any children or those whose children had grown up. The normal situation in the mill towns of the 1840s and 1850s seems to have been that only one tenth or so of all the wives went out to work in the mills; that most mothers with babies and young children stayed at home looking after them; and that the small minority of mothers with small children who did continue to work in the mills made adequate arrangements for baby-minding and child care, preferably with neighbouring kinfolk.

There was, then, an adaptation of family life and child caring to the factory environment, but it was neither on a vast or general scale nor did it necessarily cause any reduction in family sizes. More telling, perhaps, was the view that turning the sex roles within the family topsyturvy, the woman on top so to say, led women to repudiate their childbearing functions at the same time that working in the mills put them in touch with the means of doing so. The notion that birth-control literature and information circulated freely and extensively within the mills was current from the 1820s, and was confirmed by the testimony of Lancashire and West Riding medical men at the official enquiries into factory conditions in 1831 and 1833. One witness agreed ‘that certain books, the disgrace of the age, have been put forth and circulated among the females in factories’, and that ‘the circumstances of there being fewer illegitimate children [should be attributed] to that disgusting fact’. A Leeds doctor claimed that ‘books or pamphlets, which are a disgrace to any age or country have been offered for sale’ outside the mills; and another doctor asserted that ‘where individuals are congregated as in factories, I conceive that means preventive of impregnation are more likely to be generally known and practised by young persons.’ The sense of moral outrage shown by the doctors, and shared by the clergy and much of the middle class, is of more significance than any practical effect of the birth-control propaganda. The contraceptive methods being advocated – a sponge pessary ‘as large as a green walnut or small apple’ – were too complicated and too reliant on careful anticipation, as well as being too indelicate, to stand much chance of taking root among the millgirls. There was a strong current of working-class opinion which repudiated all birth-control ideas on ideological grounds, as a Malthusian-capitalist ploy designed to attribute all the social evils of poverty and destitution to overpopulation and to divert attention from improvement through social and institutional changes. The chance that the mill population retained an aversion to any artificial birth control on moral and religious grounds should not be overlooked, despite its reputation for ‘irreligion’ in the sense of non-attendance at church or chapel, since its outlook and customs were traditionalist in many other respects.

Above all, there is the evidence that male cotton spinners and weavers continued to have rather large families, of more than seven children, into the 1850s, and did not begin to limit them significantly until after 1871. This is, of course, at best only indirect evidence of the attitudes and behaviour of the mill women; but given that the mill was a meeting place of the sexes, it is probable that a high proportion of marriages were between cotton women and cotton men. It is possible that abortion, rather than contraception, was widespread in the textile areas. It was certainly denounced no less vehemently by the doctors, and perhaps with more reason since the risks of illness and death from illegal back-street abortions were extremely high. Abortifacients, of dubious efficacy, were prominent in the armoury of traditional remedies and popular self-medication, and in the course of the nineteenth century were taken up, commercialized, and heavily advertised in thinly disguised terms. Davies’s Emmenagogue Mixture of the 1890s, for example, was billed as ‘the best medicine … for all irregularities and obstructions, however obstinate or long standing … Perfectly harmless, never fails to bring about the desired result, as testified by thousands of married and single females.’ How many unwanted pregnancies were terminated, with knitting needles or drugs, is not known or knowable. All that can be said is that there is no evidence that abortions were more common in textile towns than elsewhere, and that if they were at all frequent among cotton women the data on family sizes indicate that they must have been the refuge of unmarried girls, not of wives.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the doctors, who continued to denounce all forms of birth control including coitus interruptus until well into the twentieth century, and the clergy who were scarcely less vociferous, were themselves averaging families of 2.81 and 3.04 children respectively by the 1880s and 1890s, while the textile workers whom they had so uprighteously rebuked were averaging from 3.78 children for wool and worsted weavers to 4.80 for cotton spinners. Some would call it hypocritical; or at the least the muted development of a double standard of family morals, one for the rich and another for the poor. If textile workers, or indeed any other workers, were modelling their behaviour on any members of the middle classes, they were unlikely to have had much cause to emulate the doctors. Judging by results, those who did follow the preaching, but not the practice, of the medical profession were the miners; but they had good reasons of their own, that had nothing to do with outside influences, for persisting with large families for longer than any other members of society.

Coalminers were a people apart, fiercely loyal to one another, seeing little of other members of the working classes, and conscious of the presence of other social classes chiefly in the shape of their boss, a few shopkeepers, and perhaps a local parson or minister and a doctor. Some collieries, it is true, were in towns such as Wigan or Barnsley, where miners might rub shoulders with a larger and more mixed community; but the single-industry and isolated mining villages of Lanarkshire, the north-east, the West Riding, or the valleys of South Wales were their typical habitat. Within these communities they were far from immune from religious influences, as the numerous chapels of South Wales bear witness; and the miners of Northumberland and Durham were already thought to be better educated than most workers, in the 1840s, although labelled irreligious, meaning non-Anglican. But by and large they worked out their own standards and values for themselves, not greatly influenced by the example or competition of other working-class groups, or by their masters. This mentality accepted large families as normal and did nothing very much about reducing them, largely for the negative reason that no compelling motives emerged for easing the childbearing burden of their womenfolk or reducing the number of children’s mouths to be fed. Coalmining was a continuously and rapidly expanding industry throughout the Victorian period, its expansion largely achieved by simply increasing the numbers of miners. There was always room down the pit – barring occasional years of recession – for all the sons of mining families, and indeed the growth in demand for labour was such that natural increase was rarely sufficient to supply it, the difference being made good by continual immigration from rural areas. After 1843 the law forbade the employment of women and children underground, and such work had in any case all but died out before then, save in parts of Scotland. A few brawny women continued as surface workers, sorting coal on the pithead bank, throughout the century, but they could be reckoned in thousands against the hundreds of thousands of men. In general there was little if any employment for women and children in mining communities, and they were a clear drain on financial resources, unable to add to family incomes.

There was, of course, an extra amount of unpaid housework for the womenfolk in mining villages, given the large appetites of miners, their exhaustion after a shift and disinclination to help with the chores, and the occupational needs for extra washing and laundry. Women and girls were no doubt kept busy in mining homes, but with no prospects of local employment the girls who did not marry young miners had little choice but to move away, probably into domestic service. Having so little else to do, mining girls may very well have married young, thus helping to perpetuate the tradition of large families. Some historians have argued that in the early Victorian years it was economically rational for the generality of the working classes to have large families because ‘children raised frugally and put out to work were valuable assets’. This implies that the economic utility of children declined thereafter in some areas and occupations sooner than in others, explaining the fertility differentials within the working classes; but the argument in fact confuses this point with a different one which asserts that fertility fell first in areas where there was a good deal of female employment but remained high in the mining and heavy industry areas where there was little, because women who had worked outside the home were more interested in protecting their family’s economic stability and their own personal freedom, than women who had not. If the reasoning of women, or of married couples, had worked in this way it ought to have caused miners to lead the way towards smaller families, since the economic utility of their children, especially the girls, was low and decreasing, and they should have readily grasped the need to keep the number of their children within the capacity of the husbands’ wages. The rationality of miners’ wives, and miners, was rather that they might as well continue to reproduce much as they and their forebears had always done, since there was so little else to do, even if the result was a strain on the family budget and a spell of penury while their numerous children were too young to be earning or to leave home. It was, in other words, a consequence of the failure of urbanization to reach the mining villages, since it was town life that generated the alternative pleasures and distractions and provided a clear incentive to save on children in order to spend on other indulgences and leisure.

Overlapping with differences in the timing and degree of exposure to industrialization as a factor explaining the fertility differentials within the working classes were differences in the availability of new forms of consumer goods and services. These, whether in the form of more varied clothing, clocks or pianos for working-class homes, commercial entertainments, organized sport, or seaside daytrips or holidays, were increasingly available from the 1850s onwards, were chiefly to be found only in sizeable towns, and needed quite a lot of cash. The higher paid workers in regular employment, with steady incomes, could afford them; these included not only the skilled workers in both traditional handicraft trades and new engineering occupations, but also many textile workers particularly where there were two wages in a family, many railwaymen, and many domestic servants. The low paid included the dockers, builders’ labourers, and, right at the bottom, agricultural workers; these, together with the miners far from the city lights, were the last groups to start limiting their families. Such a response, while in many ways it mirrored the presumed middle-class response to growing affluence and proliferation of home comforts, did not necessarily derive from it by way of example or imitation. It might be argued that these material and costly temptations were placed before the working classes by middle-class capitalist interests anxious to civilize or emasculate the workers, as well as to make profits. It is less far-fetched to suppose that those workers who could afford it were simply pursuing their happiness and pleasures in ways of their own choosing.

Nevertheless, economizing on children in order to be able to increase parental enjoyment was accompanied by, and reinforced by, changes in attitudes to the children themselves. There had been a time when very young children, from the age of five or six, had been widely expected to start contributing towards their keep – in agriculture, textiles, mining, chimney-sweeping, straw-plaiting, and most domestic and cottage industries – even if few had ever been really valuable economic assets. That time may have been coming to an end before legislation took a hand from 1833, with the prohibition of factory work in cotton, woollens, worsteds, flax, and linens, but not in silk mills, for all children under nine years old, and limited the work of nine- to thirteen-year-olds to nine hours a day. At any rate, there were less than 42,000 children under ten years old recorded as having any kind of employment in any occupation in 1851, a number which had fallen to 21,000 by 1871; there were 21/2 million children in Britain in the five to nine age group in 1851, and over 3 million in 1871, so that child labour had become negligible for the very young. Factory and workshop legislation came to define a child as anyone under fourteen, and sizeable numbers of ten- to fourteen-year-olds were employed in most industries throughout the Victorian period. The half-timers in the textile industries, defined by the 1844 Factory Act which limited them to a six-hour day, numbered 32,000 in 1850, increased to 105,000 by 1874, and then declined to 21,000 by 1901. And when education became compulsory, to the age of ten from 1876 and eleven from 1893, it was assumed that school-leavers would normally go out to work. Still, from the point of view of an imaginary economic parent the prospect of feeding and nurturing a child for ten or eleven years, after which it might begin to earn a few shillings a week, can scarcely have made procreation look like an attractive investment.

Calculation of the distant future earning capacity of children may be ruled out as a force regulating marital sex, though calculation of the benefit of having some child alive when the parents reached old age may have been a good reason for wishing to have some children, but not an indefinite number. It is sometimes supposed that compulsory elementary education was itself a decisive factor in bringing home the advantages of family limitation to the working classes, on the grounds that it increased the costs of upbringing per child, even after schooling was made free from 1891. This change, however, came too late to explain the early limiters who had begun reducing their families from at least the 1860s; and in any event the opportunity costs of having children at school until they were ten years old were exceedingly small, seeing that there were so few jobs for that age group. Moreover, the majority of working-class parents did not need the state to persuade or compel them into sending their children to school, but voluntarily found the weekly schoolpence to send their children to the voluntary schools of the pre-1870 era. By the end of the 1850s there were already places in elementary schools of some sort, some of them admittedly of more than doubtful standards, for at least two thirds of the total school age group of seven- to twelve-year-olds, and although attendance was erratic and in many cases barely more than token, something like one third of the age group seems to have been at school for 150 days a year or more. These proportions had been increasing since the early nineteenth century, and increasing rapidly since the state first began giving some financial aid to the voluntary societies in 1833, while factory children working in the textile mills covered by the 1833 Factory Act were obliged to attend schools provided by their employers.

It may well be, therefore, that the very substantial minority of working-class parents who were sending their children to schools well before there was any compulsion helped to create the pool of pioneers in family limitation. After all, the mentality which led parents to feel that schooling would in some way benefit their children would also be likely to lead them to feel that they could not afford to provide schooling for an indefinite number of offspring. The burden of the direct costs may not seem very heavy, a typical threepence a week for schoolpence in the early Victorian years representing an outlay of around ten shillings a year per child at school. A family with four children simultaneously of school age – which could have been normal even when completed family size reached eight or more – would have had a peak outlay of £4 a year on school fees. That would have been a very considerable, and indeed unthinkable, sum for the lower paid workers whose annual incomes, if there was only one wage-earner in the family, scarcely totalled £25; but for the higher paid with earnings of £50 a year or more it looks at first sight like a possibly supportable expense. There were, however, indirect costs: the presentable and respectable shoes and clothes which the moral pressure of neighbourhood opinion made necessary for schoolchildren, for example; and, particularly before the 1850s when child labour was more widespread, the opportunity costs of forgone child earnings. All in all, the impact of schooling on the family budgets of even the highest paid workers was sufficiently large to make some family planning of birth intervals, in order not to have too many children at once of school age, a minimum prescription of prudential behaviour. Planning for a restrained ultimate family size was only a step away from this.

Children tend to grow up and become parents in their turn. It is entirely possible that the distinction between those who had had some schooling and those who had had none, which was a very marked distinction until the 1870s and 1880s, carried over into adult life. If it did not, it is hard to see what the purpose of education was. One relevant distinction was that the educated tended to get better jobs, or at least different ones, compared to the uneducated. Some, noted earlier, became commercial clerks; and some, usually the brightest pupils of the voluntary schools, became schoolteachers, mistresses as well as masters. Both of these groups were limiting their families from the 1860s, sharply so by the 1870s. Occupational mobility within the working classes, rather than upward social mobility into the lower middle class, was, however, probably the most common experience for the educated working-class children, a move into the more skilled and less heavily manual jobs to join those whose parents were already in them. Broadly, these also were occupations showing early signs of family limitation. Whether the connection lay in the nature and circumstances of the job, or in the general parcel of values and mentalities derived from the schooling, it is impossible to tell; probably both strands of influence combined to produce the desire for smaller families.

It is also impossible to tell what weight should be given to first-generation educational influences, acting on cost-conscious parents, and what weight to second-generation influences, acting on parents who had themselves been through school. Information on both the precise chronology of family limitation and of school-going habits is insufficiently exact to sort these out, and there is no reason why both stages should not have been at work. In broad terms, however, the educational cap fits. The latecomers to family limitation among the working classes were precisely the latecomers to schooling, the dockers, builders’ labourers, and agricultural labourers who needed the spur of compulsion before their children went to school, and whose families only began to shrink significantly in the 1880s. The miners, as always, remain an exception, since they had not neglected their children’s education but still continued to have a lot of offspring.

In the schoolroom, as with the piano or the trip to Blackpool, there is a mirror image of a sort of middle-class habits and pastimes and middle-class sexual-reproductive responses. But there is very little to suggest that the formative working-class experience was in some way communicated by or copied from the middle classes, or that the working-class response was a matter of adopting habits or attitudes disseminated by the middle classes. That there were some influences working like a yeast in society at large, which emanated from the middle classes, is not to be denied; and these undoubtedly included general exhortations to prudence – although nothing so vulgar and unseemly as specific birth-control advice – which were relevant to the adoption of family limitation within the working classes. The weight of the evidence and its interpretation, however, leads to the conclusion that the middle classes and the working classes each took their separate paths, for their own separate reasons, which led, with different timing, towards the small families of the twentieth century. Broadly similar responses to broadly comparable circumstances, occurring at different times and places, were more in the nature of womankind and mankind than in the fabric of the class structure. In this fundamental matter of the family the classes worked out their own destinies and their own controls, from a common pool of techniques, and any appearance of a percolation downwards from the top of society to the bottom was a mirage of chronology rather than a fact of emulation.