ABSTRACT
The basic feature of English life during the first half of the nineteenth century was that of change - change from a small, mainly agricultural society to a large, industrial population which lived and worked in towns rather than villages. Population had first begun to grow noticeably in the middle of the eighteenth century, although at the first official census, taken in 1801, England and Wales could still only muster 8,900,000 inhabitants, scarcely more than one-third those of France, with whom we were now in mortal conflict. Within the next decade, however, nearly another million and a half were added to the English population, and by 1851 it had doubled to reach eighteen million. Various theories were advanced, and are still being advanced, in explanation of this phenomenal growth. The view that the main factor was a fall in the death rate, and particularly in child mortality, has recently come under attack, and opinion now generally favours a rise in births due to a higher rate and earlier age of marriage. The important point here is that a population which doubled in the remarkably short space of fifty years had somehow to be fed.
