Volume 1: Economy, Population and Transport

The first volume of the Nineteenth Century British Society series has been published on Kindle Amazon. There are many parallels between Britain today and the Britain ruled by Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901. Both had societies coping with substantial and sustained population growth and the tensions this creates between different ethnic groups. Today the concern is with unfettered immigration from the European Union and especially ‘economic migrants’ from beyond Europe. In the nineteenth century, there was unease over Irish immigration and, after 1880, from the influx of poor Jewish refugees especially from Eastern Europe and Russia.

Volume 1 provides the economic and demographic framework of Victorian society and the context for the other volumes in the series. It explores why Britain had become a heavily industrialised and urbanised society as a result of revolutions in the economy that began early in the eighteenth century and the nature of those changes. It examines how and why population increased considering fertility, mortality and migration providing case studies of infanticide, how women were represented and Irish migration to Britain. The challenges facing agriculture and industry in the decades after the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the impact of growing foreign competition forms an important feature of the volume. The chapter on communication considers the importance of road, water and rail as means of economic and social communication in a society in which horse-drawn transport, personified by the ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’, the ubiquitous commuter retained an important place. The book ends with a chapter that reviews the end of the nineteenth century.