The 1881 Census
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The 1881 census reflected working life more accurately than any previous one. The census was now endeavouring to reflect new social norms, as gainful occupation became more important to the nation than the class into which a person had been born.
This was the last census in which people were asked for “Rank” along with “Profession, or Occupation”. These designations blurred the lines between social and employment status. It is not at all unusual to see “gentleman” in this column, which said nothing about a person’s day-to-day activities.
Another common entry is “Ind” (independent) or “living on own means” which could mean living on the proceeds from investments, or an annuity (sometimes noted as “annuitant”), or accumulated capital. It could describe someone renting out a few properties. Productive employment status had become so important that it was explicitly stated that in enumeration, a member of parliament or peer engaged in any branch of commerce or industry had to be referred to by his stated job, not his political status. At the other end of the scale, people who were in workhouses were
referred to by the trade that they used to follow before they became impoverished.
Employment Categories
There were five major categories of employment in the census report: ‘Professional’, ‘Domestic’, ‘Commercial’, ‘Agricultural’ and ‘Industrial’. There was also a sixth category of ‘Unoccupied and Non-productive’.
Within the general categories, one huge problem was the exponential increase in specialised trades that had taken place since the last census owing to the accelerated industrialisation of the country. In 1871 a dictionary of 7,000 trades had been compiled to guide census clerks. This was insufficient for 1881, so a new dictionary had to be made up, for more than 11,000 separate trades.
The census administrators expressed frustration that “again and again” the same job came up with a different title, “by Clothier is meant in some parts a Cloth-maker, whereas in other parts it means a Clothesdealer. By Bricksetter is in some parts meant a Bricklayer, whilst in most parts it means a man who performs certain operations in Brickmaking. By Drummer may either be meant a Musician or a Blacksmith’s hammerman; by Muffin-maker, either a man who makes the eatable that bears that name, or the man who makes what is known as a muffin in China manufacture.”
Even more frustrating were the curiously named trades such as a “sad iron maker” or “bulldog burner”, who respectively made flat irons and worked with the slag produced in blast furnaces. Such specific occupations sat beside more general designations such as “engineer”, which could be someone who drove an engine or a civil engineer.
When people listed more than one occupation, the census administrators showed their preferences: “a mechanical handicraft or constructive occupation should invariably be preferred to a mere shop-keeping occupation”. When it was not obvious, the first occupation mentioned was used for the count, on the grounds that a person would be likely to mention his main business first.
Aspiration Over Accuracy
Some entries on household returns were clearly aspirational. One exasperated census administrator wrote, “Who can say how many of the 7,962 persons who were returned as Artist Painters were really such, and how many were
house decorators, who had magnified their office?”
If full-time paid work could be hard to enumerate, then seasonal, casual or part-time labour, which was more likely to relate to women and children, was all but impossible. A clear omission from the census is employment that was illegal or questionable. That there were no professional thieves in the official lists is unsurprising, but the absence of anyone earning a living from prostitution (which was legal) presents more of a conundrum for family historians.
A few hundred women did register on the household forms as prostitutes, most of them in prisons or asylums where the guards had given them jobs as enumerators and they wrote down their own occupations as they saw them. Otherwise on the household schedule they would be sometimes recorded by an enumerator as
“fallen” or “gay” (which meant prostitute to the Victorians, not homosexual); or, in one case, the whimsical “nymph of the pavé”.
Such scant records exist on the household forms. However, these schedules were then used to compile the census reports where references to prostitution just disappear from administrators’ lists. In the cumulative tables of occupations in the census report to the Government there was
room for many trades, but not prostitution or any of the euphemisms for it.
Estimates of the number of prostitutes were notoriously unreliable, which was partly a question of definition. Some women earned their whole living by selling sex. For others, sex work was seasonal, relating to times when there was limited agricultural or other work that would count as the main occupation. For others it was opportunistic: lacemakers, for example, would work outside the door of their cottages to get the maximum amount of light. This put them in the view of men who might proposition them, and some were known to supplement their income accordingly.
The absence of any prostitutes was, it was not nil. They have to be included under another heading. There is a clue in the occupational lists: 3,403,918 women were working in England and Wales, 616,425 of whom were declared to be dressmakers. This is more than the number working in the textile industry, and half the number in domestic service.
It is likely that “dressmaker” was being used as a respectable code for prostitute, as well as describing women whose sole occupation was dressmaking.
In an analysis of the ‘conjugal condition’ of the nation it was clear that married women exceeded married men in every country in the UK, making a total of 89,860 ‘excess wives’. The number of ‘married’ women under 20 was especially high. It may be that the husbands of these women were serving abroad; or they were engaged and counted that as being married; or they had a child and thought it more proper to say they had a husband.
In 1881 there were 25,974,439 people in total in England and Wales, 3,735,573 in Scotland and 5 174,115 in Ireland, an increase of 9–10 per cent in a decade.