People were concerned too about the rising population as well as the nature and pace of economic change. In the first census of 1801, the population of England and Wales was about 9 million and that of Scotland about 1.5 million. By 1851 the comparable figures were 18 million and 3 million. At its peak in the decade between 1811 and 1821, the growth rate for Britain as a whole was 17 percent. It took time to realize that Thomas Malthus’s eloquently expressed fears that population would outrun subsistence were exaggerated and that, as population grew, national production would also grow. Indeed, national income at constant prices increased nearly threefold between 1801 and 1851, substantially more than the increase in population.
The new technology reached its peak in the age of the railway and the steamship. Coal production, about 13 million tons in 1815, increased five times during the next 50 years, and by 1850 Britain was producing more than 2 million tons of pig iron, half the world’s output. Both coal and iron exports increased dramatically, with coal exports amounting to 3.3 million tons in 1851, as opposed to less than 250,000 tons at the end of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Coal mining was scattered in the coal-producing districts; there were few large towns, and miners lived a distinctive life, having their own patterns of work and leisure. Iron production was associated with larger plants and considerable urbanization. In South Wales, for example, one of the areas of industrial expansion, the Dowlais works employed 6,000 people and turned out 20,000 tons of pig iron each year during the 1840s. Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city, was the centre of a broad range of metallurgical industries that were organized mainly in small workshops that differed sharply in character from the huge textile mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
Industrialization preceded the coming of the railway, but the railroad did much to lower transport costs, to consume raw materials, to stimulate investment through an extended capital market, and to influence the location of industry. The railway age may be said to have begun in 1830, when the line from Manchester to Liverpool, the country’s most vigorously expanding port, was opened, and to have gone through its most hectic phases during the 1840s, when contemporaries talked of a “railway mania.” By 1851, 6,800 miles (11,000 km) of railway were open, some of which involved engineering feats of great complexity. There was as much argument among contemporaries about the impact of railways as there was about the impact of steam engines in factories, but there was general agreement about the fact that the coming of the railway marked a great divide in British social history. It was not until the 1870s and ’80s that steamship production came to its full realization, and by then British engineers and workers had been responsible for building railways in all parts of the world. By 1890 Britain had more registered shipping tonnage than the rest of the world put together. Cultural change The development of private life
It was in this period that private life achieved a new prominence in British society. The very term “Victorianism,” perhaps the only “ism” in history attached to the name of a sovereign, not only became synonymous with a cluster of restraining moral attributes—character, duty, will, earnestness, hard work, respectable comportment and behaviour, and thrift—but also came to be strongly associated with a new version of private life. Victoria herself symbolized much of these new patterns of life, particularly through her married life with her husband, Albert, and—much later in her reign—through the early emergence of the phenomenon of the “royal family.” That private, conjugal life was played out on the public stage of the monarchy was only one of the contradictions marking the new privacy.
However, privacy was more apparent for the better-off in society than for the poor. Restrictions on privacy among the latter were apparent in what were by modern standards large households, in which space was often shared with those outside the immediate, conjugal family of the head of household, including relatives, servants, and lodgers. Privacy was also restricted by the small size of dwellings; for example, in Scotland in 1861, 26 percent of the population lived in single-room dwellings, 39 percent in two-room dwellings, and 57 percent lived more than two to a room. It was not until the 20th century that this situation changed dramatically. Nonetheless, differences within Britain were important, and flat living in a Glasgow tenement was very different from residence in a self-contained house characteristic of large parts of the north of England. This British kind of residential pattern as a whole was itself very different from continental Europe, and despite other differences between the classes, there were similarities among the British in terms of the house as the cradle of modern privacy. The suggestive term “social privacy” has been coined to describe the experience of domestic space prior to the intervention of the municipality and the state in the provision of housing, which occurred with increasing effect after mid-century. The older cellular structure of housing, evident in the tangle of courts and alleys in the old city centres, often with cellar habitations as well, resulted in the distinction between public and private taking extremely ambiguous form. In the municipal housing that was increasingly widespread after mid-century, this gave way to a more open layout in which single elements were connected to each other.
Among housing reformers there was a dislike of dead ends, courts, and the old situation where habitations were turned in upon themselves in their own social privacy. In the new order, space became neutral and connective, and, in the new “bylaw housing,” streets were regular in layout and width, with side streets at right angles and back alleys in parallel lines. The streets outside were (and remain) surprisingly wide in contrast to the narrow alleys behind. Such streets allowed a maximum of free passage. The street outside was public and communal. The alley or lane behind was less socially neutral than the street, still rather secret. It was not a traffic thoroughfare for the public at large, being reserved for the immediate inhabitants, for the hanging of washing, and perhaps for the playing of football (soccer). In between these public and semipublic spheres and the house within was the space of the yard at the back, which in contradistinction to the street was private and individual (if less so, potentially, than the house itself). In this fashion, municipal authorities sought to inculcate privacy in the lower classes. However, conditions worked against domestic privacy for them, and it was in the homes of the better-off that privacy was most developed.
Within the dwellings of the more privileged, there was a trend towards the specialization of rooms, the separation of the public from the private sides of life, and the development of distinct spheres for women and children. A society based on achieved status, as British society was slowly becoming, was very concerned to regulate and legitimize social relationships of gender and status, and the spaces of the home served as a means of doing this. From about the 1820s a family pattern developed that was conditioned by spatial environments that resulted from the new significance of home and domesticity. The home was to be a retreat from the stress of the world and a haven of security. This change in perspective was associated with other developments, namely the retreat from the centre of cities to the suburbs—evident in Manchester, for example, as early as the 1820s—along with a concomitant switch in housing style from the 18th-century terrace (row houses) to the detached or semidetached villa. In the move from the terrace, what was once the common garden of the square gave way to a separate, private garden. The common and more public rooms of the house, which were once for use by all members of the family, were relocated on the ground floor, with the other stories of the house being limited to the use of family members in a distinct domestic sphere. In terms of the development of working-class domesticity, by mid-century there was a clear gender division of labour between men and women (though it was often contradicted in practice by economic necessity and local employment conditions), based on the assumption that a man was to be the main and preferably sole breadwinner and head of the household. This pattern of gender relationships had profound influence on working-class institutions, not only on the trade union movement but also on the club and association life that was so central to the leisure activity of the less well-off.