ABSTRACT
Official statistics of the rates of illegitimate births under the English and Scottish Civil Registration Acts of 1836 and 1854 respectively must be treated with caution. Until 1874 registration of births in England was not even compulsory; in 1867 the proportion of nonregistrations in parts of London alone was estimated at anything between 15 and 33 per cent, 1 and as the local Registrars had to depend on their informants’ word, many illegitimates were in fact being registered as legitimate. 2 Country districts showed a higher bastardy rate than towns. In the late 1850s, while London was estimated to have a rate of 4.2 per cent, for example, Cumberland, Westmorland and Norfolk revealed rates of over 10 per cent, and Scottish rates could go much higher. Country customs, as I mentioned in the last chapter, were earthier, but in the towns, we must remember, there was more scope for concealing illegitimate births. The British Medical Journal in 1867 3 sceptically compared the official bastardy rates for some wealthy London West End parishes – like Marylebone at 9.1 per cent and St Pancras at 5.1 per cent – with poor East End parishes like Whitechapel at 3.3 per cent and Stepney at 1.6 per cent, and invited readers to question whether the denizens of the slums were really more chaste, or more misleading. The Registrar General believed there was a 10 per cent underestimate in the official returns of illegitimate births, but the Infant Life Protection Society (see Chapter 12) in 1870 put it as high as 30 per cent. 4 Even when the 1874 Registration Act made registration of births compulsory this could still be widely evaded, either by pretending that a dead baby was stillborn (this did not have to be registered) or by exploiting the six-week period of grace allowed by the law before registration, and decamping untraceably from the district. I shall, however, use the official returns for England and Wales, unless otherwise stated. 5
