The Demography of Victorian England and Wales (review)

Robert Woods. The Demography of Victorian England and Wales. Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time, no. 35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xxv + 447 pp. Ill. $69.95 (0-521-78254-6).

Robert Woods is possibly the leading historical demographer of England and Wales during the civil registration period, and The Demography of Victorian England and Wales is a long-awaited synthesis of his research into a single volume. The main aim of the book is the description and interpretation of geographically and socially differentiated patterns and changes in nuptiality, fertility, mortality, and migration, using the tabulations of births, deaths, and marriages in the Registrar General's Annual Reports and Decennial Supplements as his principal data source. The lack of sufficiently detailed data relating to nuptiality, fertility, and migration means that the volume is dominated by the study of mortality. Nevertheless, Woods manages to provide a coherent and integrated picture of Victorian demographic differentials and change which, while containing no major new findings, offers new emphases and interpretation.

The Victorian era is particularly interesting because of the transition from high to low levels of both fertility and mortality, and this forms a central topic of the book. Woods's geographical analysis of the mortality decline and his consideration of the environmental influences on different diseases lead him to suggest that the decline in mortality from phthisis (pulmonary tuberculosis) was due more to an exogenous decrease in the virulence of the disease than to better nutrition and increasing standards of living. He concludes that epidemiologic changes were also implicated in the mid-nineteenth-century upturn of early childhood mortality, which he classes as an exogenously determined cyclical rise, rather than the effect of urban population growth. This leads him to reassign the origins of the secular decline in early childhood mortality to the late nineteenth century, the period when nondiarrheal infant mortality began its decline. Woods emphasizes the synergy of fertility and childhood mortality and argues for a demographic revolution characterized by the simultaneous decline in both, caused by changing attitudes toward reproduction and the inexorable rise in female education (although, since fertility declined from the 1870s, a simultaneous decline does not sit entirely happily with the later repositioning of the secular decline in childhood mortality). Although the classic demographic transition model (in which mortality decline is a necessary precursor to fertility decline) has long since been discredited, and Woods warns against drawing demographic lessons from the European past, he appears to introduce a new precondition: only when fertility and childhood mortality decline together "can effective fertility be reduced in a sustainable way" (p. 399).

The analysis revisits much of Woods's previous work, while providing more historical background. Some aspects are redeveloped; for example, he extends the analysis of urbanization on overall mortality levels by considering the effect of broadening suburbanization on London's death rates. However, in view of his earlier interests in the age structure of mortality, particularly the varying relationship between infant and early childhood mortality, it is surprising that in this book he chooses to consider a composite measure of the two.

The book is lavishly illustrated with high-quality and cleverly conceived maps, graphs, and tables—although unfortunately the titling and labeling are sometimes insufficient to make the figures understood without reference to the text.

Despite a coherent data source and careful analysis, some questions remain intractable (how did fertility decline? why did nuptiality increase in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries?) and others are answered by recourse to unmeasurable influences (epidemiology, education, and attitudes). It is often the lot of historical demographers to have their appetites whetted by ecological correlations and plausible arguments, but to be unable to provide quantitative demonstrations of their theories, but it is a tribute to Woods's scholarship that he has created such a thorough and coherent demographic history. Perhaps the most widely applicable lesson of this excellent book...