ABSTRACT
Included in this section are excerpts from newspapers published in various parts of Britain, both agricultural and industrial, during the late 1860s and early 1870s. Especially interesting are reports on people leaving for the United States (and Canada) and settling there. Some are encouraging, and others report on people wanting to return to England. In them we find information about the emigrants’ circumstances in Britain during a time of economic depression, and their new situation in the United States. ‘The Occupations of Emigrants Leaving England’, from The Times of 1870, shows large numbers of building trades workers (as one would expect from this period), but also surprising numbers of professionals and gentlemen. Yet, by far the largest number are ‘general labourers’, which affirms the trend discussed in the introduction that British migration after the Civil War was taking more and more the form of a labour migration. And yet, the farmers remain very numerous. The fact that the second largest category is ‘married women’ shows that in spite of the trend towards single labourers, British immigration remained more familial (and more agrarian) than that of other groups arriving at the time.
