The historical study of the family has been fraught with difficulties, not least because many records are more informative of what people in the past thought the family should be, rather than giving us much information on how families were actually constituted or reporting the experience of family life. The fact, too, that everyone at some time lives in a family and that many of its features seem timeless, rooted in biology, makes it perplexing to grasp the great diversity of families over time.

Yet even the definition of who was part of the family has changed radically. At the beginning of the period, the family was often still conceived as a group of dependants: wife, children, lesser kin, servants and apprentices attached to the household of the masculine head, usually the master/husband/father. The male principal had only recently come to be regarded as part of that family unit. In political thought, theology and the common sense of daily life, this conception of the family was the template for most other organisations and was seen as the foundation of society.

Numerous recent studies have thrown some light on the many variations in the lived experience of individuals in families, kinship networks and households. The problem is, however, that, like a torch turned on particular items in a darkened but crowded room, such research can only illuminate what is caught in its beam, leaving the general picture still obscure.

THE REGION

Compared with many of the modern economic regions of Britain, which exist more for administrative than any organic reason, the north-east does appear to have some intrinsic merits and historical validity as a region. If we take as the basic region the old administrative counties of Northumberland and Durham, it has reasonably well-defined geographical boundaries with the North Sea, the Scottish border, the central uplands and the river valley of the Tees. It was, therefore, firmly distinguished to the east, to the north (if really only by the ancient antagonisms of race) and to the west by hills which restricted mobility. Only to the south was the region weakly bounded in a sparsely populated agricultural and metal-mining area between the south Durham coalfield and the developing West Riding towns. More than the simple boundaries of regional geography gave the area some unity, however. In an age when overland transport was very costly, the sea was the major highway for the movement of heavy or bulky goods. It was, therefore, inevitable that commercial activity looked to the nearest coast for other than local trade and that towns such as Bishop Auckland, Durham, Hexham, Morpeth (and their environs) should look to the east and the market powers of towns such as Newcastle, Sunderland and Stockton with their river access to the sea. Ultimately (but paradoxically since it covered only a minor part of the region) it was the coal industry which gave unity to the region. In an age when its population was sparse and its other attractions limited, the north-east was to all intents and purposes (and especially to south-eastern intents and purposes) the Great Northern coalfield.

This chapter does not provide a comprehensive survey of demographic change in Britain between 1750 and 1950. Its main purpose is to identify the principal changes in demographic behaviour which, in one way or another, set a context for, raised opportunities for, or constrained other aspects of social life in the 200 years covered by this volume.

POPULATION, ITS DISTRIBUTION AND MOVEMENT

In 1750, the population of England was about 5.75 million. Scotland had 1.25 million people, and Wales 0.5 million. A century later, in 1851, the numbers had more than doubled, to 16.7 million, 2.9 million and 1.2 million respectively; by 1951 they had reached 41.6 million, 5.1 million and 2.2 million.

In general, as is clear from Figure 1.1, Scotland's population grew more slowly than that of England and Wales, but in both countries the rate of growth, rapid in the mid-eighteenth century in comparison with the past, peaked in the early nineteenth century, remained high until the end of the century and subsequently declined. At its highest rate, in the years 1811–21, England added 18 per cent to its population in a decade and Scotland nearly 16 per cent. At its absolute peak, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Great Britain's population grew by almost 4 million: in just one decade there were 4 million more people to be fed, employed, amused and housed. In a long-term historical perspective, the most remarkable feature of demographic change in our period was the ability of the British society and economy to cope so well with this massive and unprecedented rise in population.

This chapter cannot hope to provide an exhaustive history of work over the period. Rather, it takes what is probably the major insight of recent scholarship on industrial capitalism, and attempts to work out some of the consequences of this insight. The realisation that the factory and the machine should form a part and not the whole of our picture of industrialisation is a relatively recent one. Coming to terms with the diversity and irregularity of capitalist development involves therefore a critical account of older notions of social and political change predicated on now questionable premises. It also necessitates the attempt in turn to relate such change to a more adequate notion of the economy and work experience, a relation that is itself revealed as problematic. The attempt to balance old and new accounts – for it may be a question of balance rather than simple substitution – must therefore be historiographical and theoretical, as well as empirical. In, broadly, the first half of the chapter an empirical approach predominates, as the principal features of work are delineated. Towards the close of section two, problems associated with newer perspectives are raised in a speculative manner, which steadily becomes more historiographical in approach. However, we shall begin at the beginning, namely what people worked at in the past.

Part 1: The policeman-state

INTRODUCTION

For centuries in Britain, stealing from and hurting other people have been pursuits as common and traditional as drinking and fornicating. All social classes have participated in them. Poorer and younger people have stolen to procure food or clothing, to demonstrate daring, or to relieve tedium. Affluent, older or upwardly mobile people have embezzled, evaded taxes, excise and currency regulations, defrauded each other and their clients under the guise of commercial or professional practice, and lifted from shops. They have done these things far more frequently than the courts have ever recognised, as self-report studies nowadays show. And in times past, for good measure, the rich no less than the poor used violence to assert prowess, relieve tension and settle disputes. ‘Crime’ in these many senses has been as much a part of our national heritage as has a taste for beer, politics and sex.

This makes the history of crime an unimaginably large subject. Commentators usually therefore take a short cut. They address themselves not to the ubiquity of law-breaking at all social levels, but to those actions, merely, which come to be labelled as crimes by the reactions of the law-enforcement and judicial systems. This in turn, however, puts them at the mercy of the prejudices and constraints which determine how the law selects some targets and ignores others. That is why no discussion of ‘crime’ can sensibly proceed which does not first discuss how, by whom and why attitudes and policies towards crime are formed, and what often covert purposes those policies serve.

‘England was early in the field with a productive, expansible agriculture.’ Among specialists in agrarian history there are diverse opinions concerning the extent of changes in farming practices and the rate at which increases in output were achieved before and during the eighteenth century, but no one disputes that England stood in the vanguard of agrarian progress. Moreover it is generally agreed that the agrarian sector was commercialised to an extent unmatched elsewhere, except in Holland. These advances had been accompanied and no doubt in some respects facilitated by changes in the composition of rural society. From the vantage point of the later eighteenth century a marked contrast with the position in contemporary Europe was discernible. English rural society in no way resembled that of territories east of the Elbe, characterised by enormous estates worked by hordes of unemancipated serfs; nor did it exhibit the pattern common to much of Western Europe, where much land continued to be held in relatively tiny units farmed by peasants. In England, through a lengthy process of evolution there had emerged a tripartite system, featuring landlords who were essentially rent receivers but who bore certain responsibilities for the provision of fixed capital; substantial tenant farmers, directly responsible for the working of the land through the application of their entrepreneurial energies and working capital; and landless or virtually landless wage earners whose contribution derived from their application of strength and skill and who were surprisingly numerous even in the sixteenth century.

TIME FOR LEISURE

The most obvious way of providing some parameters for the history of leisure is to regard leisure as time; it is the time which is left over after work and other obligations have been completed. Any hope, however, that such an approach will provide clear and unambiguous statistics of the changes in the amount of leisure time available to the population must, for a number of reasons, be discounted. First, there were always jobs in which working hours contained within them periods of leisure of an episodic or more or less regular character; examples include the workshop trades of the nineteenth century, such as printing, in which there was time for drinking and other workshop pranks, and in the twentieth century ship building where the scale of the enterprise made it impossible for supervisory staff to prevent card-playing at work. Secondly, there were jobs in which the working hours were never rigorously defined by the clock, and for which it is difficult to establish accurate figures for hours of work; such jobs, whose hours varied according to the day of the week and the season of the year, included agriculture, and all small workshop and domestic work. Significantly women were a large part of the workforce in many of these jobs. Thirdly, figures for hours of work exclude overtime, and until the 1920s there are no statistics to facilitate an accurate assessment of its extent; what is certain, however, is that overtime working has increased in the twentieth century and to that extent eaten into the apparent growth in leisure time.

As long as the state of domestic agriculture was the principal determinant of food consumption, the population of Britain depended on a limited range of food materials which were available on a markedly seasonal basis. While traditional forms of food preservation persisted, this meant that dietary patterns were circumscribed by the availability and durability of foodstuffs. Thus the predominant food material in all parts of Britain on the eve of the industrial revolution was some kind of bread-grain, either wheat, barley or oats, surpluses of which were processed to produce beer and spirits. Animal food was preserved by the liberal use of salt. Bacon or pickled meat, salt fish, butter and, to a lesser extent, cheese fell into this category. Green vegetables were seasonal in supply, as were pulses, roots or bulbs such as onions, though the latter were capable of storage for some time. Nevertheless, every year brought the ‘hungry gap’ of the late winter and early spring when supplies of vegetables were exhausted, a pattern which was not entirely eradicated in country districts on the eve of the Great War in 1914.

Even before the industrial revolution, there were growing differences in what people ate or drank which reflected changes in their style of life. In predominantly agricultural areas, where the majority of the population lived, it was still usual to process food in the home and the self-reliance of families which kept animals and brewed and baked for themselves made it appear that little change was in sight.

‘Modern Wales’ emerged in these years with the transition from a predominantly rural society at the outset to an increasingly industrial and urbanised one and the replacement of the old social and political dominance of the landed classes by freedom and democracy. This transformation from a traditional to an urban world was, of course, a British phenomenon but, for all that, Welsh society was to exhibit characteristics which were to contrast with its English counterpart. Accordingly, a principal aim of this chapter will be to explore and explain those distinctive aspects of Wales's culture and society. Nineteenth-century Welsh society was shaped above all by its pervading nonconformist ethos and, closely bound up with it, the Welsh language. Such separate traits as emerged were to be largely neglected by successive English governments down to the 1880s, not to mention the ill-natured ridicule of things Welsh by the London press, a state of affairs which, indeed, did so much to fuel the nationalist drive of the 1880s and 1890s for securing recognition of Wales's separate identity. This distinct nationality notwithstanding, increasing industrialisation locked Wales more and more into a ‘fated mutuality’ with the English, and another aim will be to show how growing English influence had profound implications for the survival of the traditional ‘Welsh way of life’. While declining everywhere from the 1920s, this traditional ‘Welsh’ culture, based on the language, chapel and class harmony was, indeed, from the opening decades of this century to be increasingly jettisoned by the vigorous, rapidly anglicising coalfield society of South Wales, and a further concern will be to analyse the equally distinctive culture that came to replace it, a culture characterised by its remarkable degree of class and community loyalty.

In spite of a continuing sense of national identity, Scotland in the eighteenth century was a country of marked regional and ethnic differences. The major division was between the English-speaking areas, all in what is called the Lowlands, and the area of Gaelic usage, the Highlands. The line dividing English from Gaelic speech had been narrowing down the Gaeltacht for centuries, and by the mid-eighteenth century lay very near to the great geological fault which makes the highland edge, though even so there were English-speaking areas to the north of the fault: most of the plain forming the southern coast of the Moray Firth, the town of Inverness, the triangle of Caithness lying beyond the county of Sutherland. The division was not simply one of speech, but of culture, social structure and the means of disseminating culture. There were, before the 1780s, practically no printed books in Gaelic: a translation of the psalms existed, but was not readily available, since it had never been properly distributed. The lack of an Old Testament in Gaelic meant that the imageries used in Scottish and in Gaelic literature were totally separate. Few even of educated men in the Highlands could express themselves in Gaelic on paper with accepted orthography. Gaelic culture was mostly conveyed in song, and usually by the physical presence of the singer. The poetic base of these songs might be the creation of either sex, though male assumptions have sometimes left the name of women poets unknown. The highland area was poor and economically backward, feeding itself marginally on its own grain and the erratic supply of milk and blood from its cattle. Difficulties in land transport perpetuated poverty.

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF MEDICINE

The social history of medicine, like most social history, is primarily a development of the last two decades, and arose out of the same congruence of interests which have transformed economic and labour history into social history in that period. The older tradition of the history of medicine, which it has by no means displaced, saw the discipline as essentially inward-looking. This was a doctor-oriented version of medicine, justifying medical history as an illumination of the internal history of the profession or of the discovery or development of technical medical procedures. It assumed a Whig framework of progress towards ever-superior forms of knowledge or organisation, culminating in the state of medical practice at the present day. It therefore had a strongly biographical emphasis; the lives of the ‘great men’ of medicine filled the shelves of the medical history sections. The scientific basis of medical practice was seen as a series of discoveries and of contributions or advances towards present understanding; the analysis of medical institutions was in terms of celebratory histories concentrating on internal milestones of development. ‘The need for a knowledge of the origin and growth of one's profession is surely self-evident’, said Sir Douglas Guthrie in his Presidential address to the History of Medicine section of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1957, ‘it is obvious that history supplies an essential basis for medicine. It gives us ideals to follow, inspirations for our work and hope for the future.’The ‘graph of medical progress’ could, he considered, be depicted as ‘an ever-mounting curve’.

In the chapter on ‘Social Movements’ in Volume 12 of the old Cambridge Modern History published in 1910, Sidney Webb predicted that one of the main characteristics of twentieth-century society would be that it would consist only of government and of private citizens. As democratic rights were extended and as public authorities acquired increasingly extensive powers over social and economic affairs, the great ramshackle mass of private, pluralistic and voluntary institutions that had constituted the fabric of past societies would be progressively displaced by a streamlined, simplified, rationalised two-way relationship between the individual and the state. Seventy years later a distinguished American political scientist, Samuel Beer, diagnosed the relationship between British government and society in the latter half of the twentieth century in diametrically opposite terms: government had acquired greater powers and citizens had acquired greater democratic rights, but these trends had been accompanied by a proliferation of pluralistic interest groups unprecedented in British history. The upshot was that both government and individuals were in many ways more impotent than they had been under the traditional, restricted, imperfectly democratic system that had prevailed earlier in the century.

Curiously enough, though apparently the antithesis of each other, both the predictions of Sidney Webb and the historical diagnosis of Professor Beer contain important elements of historical truth. They both capture genuine elements in the immensely complex and continually changing relationship between British government and society in the twentieth century. This pattern of change to a certain extent reflects global rather than purely national history – the pressures of war, industrialisation, ideological dissent and demographic growth that have remodelled government institutions in all advanced countries.

‘There are many ways of regarding the house’, warned The Builder in 1881, ‘and most of them, it must be confessed, are prosaic.’ This caution is salutary, but it may be that a concentration on two of the many possible approaches to the history of housing may avoid the perils of tedium. One is the relationship between design and society, between the physical form of housing and the social life it contains. The individual house could relate to the external environment in a variety of forms, with the threshold between private and public space drawn at different points and with more or less emphasis. The physical structure of the house might be articulated in a number of ways, with the internal space used in a more or less specialised or undifferentiated manner. The second theme is the relationships which emerged from the ownership, management and occupation of housing. It is wrong to view houses merely as a collection of inert bricks and mortar, for they involved conflict over the distribution of income and resources between landlord and tenant, rates and rents, private enterprise and public initiatives. The outcome could affect not only the daily lives of residents, determining the amount they paid for accommodation and the terms on which it was held, but could also impinge on social structure and political debate. The emergence of a nation of owner-occupiers has very different social and political implications from a nation of tenants, and it is necessary both to explain how this change occurred, and to assess the consequences.

The theme of this chapter is the manner in which Government influenced the lives of citizens of England and Wales, their behaviour and conditions of life according to which principles and with what effects. A central assumption – widely shared for a substantial portion of the period, most fully developed in the ideas and actions of Peel and Gladstone, though with earlier roots, and most dominant from the 1840s to the 1870s – was that the government's role was at most strictly limited, that it not only should not but could not determine the structure and working of society. Rather its role was to provide a firmly established and clearly understood framework within which society could very largely run itself.

Even in the mid-Victorian period the reality of government action did not wholly match this ideal, but it was widely enough shared at all social levels for government transgression of it long to require justification against challenges. It had distinctive institutional effects. In contrast with most other societies of the period in England and Wales, many of the functions performed by central government elsewhere were, throughout the period, performed by groups of self-governing citizens either on an elective, but unpaid, official basis, as in the various institutions of local government, or through voluntary associations. Though Britain certainly possessed highly effective central government institutions, unlike other European countries she did not develop in the nineteenth century a strong bureaucratic stratum with powerful interests of its own, a strong set of popular expectations of the role of the state or a sense of popular identification with it.

If Britain was the first industrial and urban nation, it was also, for much of the period between 1750 and 1950, a remarkably religious one. During the first century of industrialisation the social relevance of religion actually increased, and the churches played a major role in both the public and the private spheres. Religion provides one of the keys to the history of the age.

Given Christianity's ancient origins, that may seem surprising: was not a traditional faith bound to wither away in a period of rapid modernisation? And since the two main churches, the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, had been integral parts of the pre-1832 ‘old regime’, were they not also bound to decline in an age of liberal and democratic political reform?

Similar questions were posed about the churches in all the advanced European countries. But Britain's answers were different. For while the established churches in Britain were comparable to those in Europe, there was also, as in America, an array of competing independent denominations. The combination of European quasi-monopoly and American ‘free market’ gave British religious life much of its distinctive character.

In the event the churches thrived on competition and for much of the period responded to social and political change with considerable success. During the Victorian religious ‘boom’ their influence, for better or worse, was greater than it had been since the seventeenth century; like America in more recent times, Victorian Britain shows that a modernising society can be religious.