Population Changes in England and Wales in the Later Nineteenth Century: An Analysis of Trends by Registration Districts

Abstract

THE REDISTRIBUTION of population in Victorian England has provided both contemporary and modem writers with a rich, and often controversial, field of study. The mobility of population was rightly seen as reflecting a changing economy and society and, as such, was a key to the understanding of the impact of new technologies and new forms of economic organization on the numbers, distribution and characteristics of the people. Such issues as the causes and effects of rural depopulation and the problems of providing housing, sanitation and, later, education for a rapidly growing and increasingly urban population were the focus of much debate and many government inquiries. But if the theme is a familiar one, the analysis of the data is curiously incomplete. In particular there have been few detailed analyses of regional variations in population distribution and the factors involved in population change, despite the evidence available in censuses from I8oi onward, especially in the detailed censuses from I841. Such analyses as have been made are principally concerned with the distribution of trends in total population numbers, a wholly inadequate basis for the analysis of the nature of population growth and of the factors underlying it. A typology of population development in nineteenth-century England has not so far been developed, though recent work by J. W. Webb (I962) has suggested a simple method of analysis which relates both natural and migrational components of population change. The present paper, which concentrates upon the role of migration in population change, is based primarily on an analysis of census data on net migration, with special reference to the factors which underlie regional fluctuations in population trends caused by migration in the