INTRODUCTION

The trend in working-class living standards from the Great Exhibition to the eve of the Second World War has generated relatively little controversy compared to the debate over living standards during the industrial revolution. Most economic historians agree that real wages increased significantly from 1851 to 1913, and continued to increase during the interwar period. However, despite these achievements, the social surveys of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras revealed high rates of urban poverty and ‘a working-class stunted and debilitated by a century of industrialism’ (Hobsbawm 1968: 137). This suggests that, as with the period 1780–1860, one might reach a different conclusion about trends in and levels of working-class living standards depending on what type of information is examined.

Economic historians measure movements in living standards in various ways, by examining trends in real wage rates or incomes of workers (or more rarely households), national income per capita, life expectancy at birth (or at other ages), infant mortality and height by age. These measures can to some extent be grouped into economic indicators of material living standards – real wages, per capita income – and biological indicators – life expectancy, infant mortality and height by age, which are sometimes said to measure ‘quality of life’. Biological measures suggest a somewhat less optimistic assessment of the trend in working-class living standards than do wage series, at least up to 1900. In order to determine the extent to which living standards improved from 1860 to 1939, it therefore is necessary to examine trends in both economic and biological indicators for the working class as a whole and also for occupational subgroups of the working class.