THE VICTORIANS
As the population boomed, rural employment waned and emerging cities offered factory jobs and rising wages, the reign of Queen Victoria saw a mass migration of workers from the countryside to urban centres, says Emma Griffin
The reign of Queen Victoria saw mass migration from the countryside to the city, reveals Emma Griffin
“By the 1870s, the total population of Glasgow was nearing half a million people”
Victorian Britain was a period of rapid social, political and economic change. By the 1830s, the effects of industrialisation had become unmistakable, and Britain was discernibly richer, more urban and more industrial than any other nation. Growing industries, such as textiles, mining and metalworking, were hungry for workers and encouraged the migration of people away from the countryside and into the expanding cities.
The growth of some cities was simply phenomenal: the populations of Glasgow and Manchester, for example, doubled between 1801 and the 1820s and then doubled again by 1851. By the 1870s, the total number of inhabitants of Glasgow was approaching half a million. Because of population growth, the total number of people living in the countryside continued to rise slightly, but as a proportion of the population it was sharply decreasing; rural inhabitants had already become the minority by the census of 1851. The new, modernised industries were the driving force behind Victorian prosperity, and workers were lured to the cities by the higher wages they promised. But although urban wages were rising, the cities were also home to very high levels of poverty.
Part of the problem was that the workforce was divided by gender: women tended not to work outside the home, and wages were paid instead to male breadwinners. But a high male mortality rate, as well as high levels of family breakdown, left many women and children without a father or
husband to depend on. The lack of decent work for women left female-headed households extremely impoverished, and helps to explain why Victorian cities were such unequal places, with both high wages and pockets of alarming deprivation.
RURAL STABILITY
Life in the countryside was very different. Wages were lower, but life was far more secure and more equal. Rural communities tended to have a small number of landowners and farmers, who employed their workers on broadly the same rate of pay. Family breakdown was virtually unheard of, so although male wages tended to be lower, truly destitute families were rare. As a result, despite the rapidly changing nature of urban Britain, the social life of rural England remained remarkably stable.