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Sexual
practices and desire
If
the sexual practices of young people had remained unchanged one would expect
falling marriage ages to have been accompanied by falling not rising illegitimacy.
The fact that illegitimacy rose at the same time as marriage ages fell, together
with the evidence we have on rising illegitimacy and pre-marital conceptions,
suggests that young people were embarking upon reproductive sexual activity
at a younger age than in earlier generations. This in turn was probably closely
related to the economic changes taking place. Growing landlessness (proletarianisation),
the migration of young people away from the constraints and controls of village
communities and their ability to earn wages earlier in life appear to have
been important in encouraging greater freedom of courtship and more active
social and sexual lives. The decline of live-in farm service and of seven-year
residential apprenticeships, which acted to control freedom of courtship and
marriage, also played a part.
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Many
contemporaries, most notably Thomas
Malthus emphasised the role of the poor relief system (especially the
practice of supplementing low wages with doles from the parish) in encouraging
'beggar weddings' free from the poverty constraints which might have prevented
marriage in earlier times. More recent research has suggested that poor
relief measures in expanding industrial areas were actually very stingy
but that marriage was often encouraged by small grants and payments in kind
which were made in order to prevent young single mothers becoming a burden
on the rates. Contemporary critics of industrialism blamed the rise of illegitimacy
and greater sexual licence upon the mixed, youthful and immoral workforces
of the factories and urban slums, the decline of religious observance and
the growth of female wage earning which was regarded as having destroyed
female virtues of modesty and sexual morality. These may all have contributed.
Some historians have suggested that sexual desire was growing alongside
the desire for material possessions, that the two influenced each other
and that both were part of a wider cultural change which ushered in a more
materialistic and possessive age. |
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Death
rates
On
the mortality side of the equation of population growth, between the 1730s
and 1811, average life expectancy at birth rose from about 33 to 38 years
and increased again to 41 years by 1861. Urban death rates were very high
in the eighteenth
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Thomas
Robert Malthus
(1766-1834)
Illustration by Matthew Wright
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and
early nineteenth centuries and large towns and cities could only sustain
their growth through massive migration from the countryside. Urban mortality
rates, particularly infant mortality, remained higher than rural mortality
rates until the later nineteenth century but, in both town and country,
death rates were falling significantly as the supply and quality of food
increased, and as employment and incomes remained relatively buoyant. Sanitary
arrangements slowly improved in towns in the nineteenth century with innovations
in water supply, sewage disposal and lighting. These further contributed
to falling urban mortality rates but their effects were not felt until the
later part of the nineteenth century. |
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