ABSTRACT
The breakthrough towards an industrialized society had already occurred before the Victorian period began. But although, taking the long-term view, the transformation proceeded with ever-increasing momentum throughout the century, this was by no means how contemporaries always saw it. In the six years after the wars with Napoleon there were serious doubts that the expansion of the previous thirty years could be maintained. Though the years from 1831 to 1836 were a time of considerable growth this was not reflected in any marked increase in real wages, while from 1836 to 1842 there were bad harvests and a depression in the cotton industry; and the
economy proved incapable of absorbing a labour force greatly enlarged as a result of the marked and apparently unexplained increase in the birth rate during the century’s second decade. The economic advance that took place from the mid-forties onward was largely a consequence of the development of the railways and then of steamships, and was sustained by a great increase of productivity in agriculture. Between 1816 and 1842 exports had risen at an average annual rate of 7 per cent; but from 1842 to 1873 the rate was 11 per cent, while the annual value of exports rose from just above £50 million in the former year to well over £200 million in the 1870s.
