This aggregate-level dataset links poor relief data recorded on 1 January 1891 with several variables from corresponding 1891 census data, all at the level of the registration district (RD). Specifically, the numbers of men and women receiving indoor and outdoor relief in the ‘non-able-bodied’ category (taken as a proxy of the numbers of older-age men and women on relief) are accompanied with a series of socio-economic variables calculated from census data on the population aged 60 years and over (our definition of ‘old age’).

Thus, the dataset fulfils two objectives:

1. To start reconciling poor relief data from the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers archive with transcribed Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) available at the UK Data Service (UKDS).

2. To capture geographical variations in the proportion of older-age men and women on poor relief as well as in several household, occupational and migratory compositions recorded in the census, consulting data from 1891 as a pilot study in anticipation of an extended project covering all censuses from 1851-1911.

   The study of old age in history has generally had a narrow focus on welfare needs. Specific studies of the extreme poverty, or pauperism, of older people in late nineteenth-century London by Victorian contemporary Charles Booth (1840-1916) have remained remarkably influential for historical research on old age (Booth, 1894; Boyer and Schmidle, 2009). Old age is also examined through institutional care, particularly workhouse accommodation (Lievers, 2009; Ritch, 2014), while the subgroup of the elderly population that were not poor has been underexplored. However, my PhD thesis shows that pauperism was not a universal experience of old age between 1851 and 1911. Using transcribed census data for five selected counties in England and Wales, I find that pauperism was contingent upon many socio-economic factors recorded in census datasets, such as the occupational structure of older people, their living arrangements and their capacity to voluntarily retire from work based on their savings, land and capital. I find that, in some districts of the northern counties of Cheshire and the Yorkshire West Riding, the proportion of men described in the census as 'retired' and the proportion of women 'living on their own means' was greater than the respective proportions of men and women on welfare. For elderly men in particular, there were regional differences in agrarian work, where those in northern England are more likely to run smallholding 'family farms' whereas, in southern England, elderly men generally participate as agricultural labourers. I find that these differences play an important part in the likelihood of becoming pauperised, and adds to the idea of a north-south divide in old age pauperism (King, 2000). Furthermore, pauperism was predicated on the events and circumstances of people throughout their life histories and approaching their old age.

My fellowship will enable me to expand upon these findings through limited additional research that stresses an examination of the experiences of all older people in England and Wales. Old age has to be assessed more widely in relation to regional and geographical characteristics. In this way, we refine Booth's London-centric focus on the relationship between poverty and old age. My fellowship will achieve these objectives by systematically tracing the diversity of old age experiences. A pilot study will link welfare data recorded on 1 January 1891 from the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers archive with the socio-economic indicators contained in the 1891 census conducted on 5 April, all incorporated at the level of c. 650 registration districts in England and Wales. I will also visit record offices to extract data on the names of older people recorded as receiving welfare in materials related to the New Poor Law, thereby expanding on the PhD's examination of the life histories of older people.

With the key findings from my PhD presented above, I will spend my time addressing a wider audience on my research. As I will argue in blogs and webinars addressed to Age UK, the International Longevity Centre UK and History and Policy, a monolithic narrative of old age as associated with welfare dependency and gradual decline has been constructed since Booth's research in the late nineteenth century. This narrative has remained fixed through the growth of our ageing population, and the development of both old age pensions and the modern welfare state. My research alternatively uses historical censuses that reveal the economic productivity of older people in a manner that is not satisfactorily captured in present day discourse. I will also receive training on how to address my PhD to local schools, through the presentation of maps that present variations in the proportions of older people receiving welfare, and in the application of transcribed census data.

This dataset is intended for researchers, students, and policy makers for reference and mapping purposes, and may be used for basic applications such as viewing, querying, and map output production, or to provide a basemap to support graphical overlays and analysis with other spatial data.

This is an individual-level and longitudinal dataset comprising the life histories of men and women aged 60 years and over who were recorded in source materials related to the New Poor Law regime in late-Victorian England. The New Poor Law was responsible for the overall administration of state-funded welfare for the poor, particularly to those who were deemed ‘not-able-bodied’, of which the ‘aged and infirm’ were a substantial subcategory. The majority of those applying for welfare (or what was then termed ‘poor relief’) would receive a weekly allowance paid in one’s household, or ‘outdoor relief’. On average, single applicants could receive between 2-3 shillings weekly, although married couples could receive up to 4 shillings (Lees, 1998).

However, an application for outdoor relief could be rejected by the Board of Guardians, who were responsible for issuing poor relief in their respective Poor Law Union. There were approximately 650 Poor Law Unions in England and Wales, comprising a group of adjacent parishes, and were roughly coterminous with the registration districts used as boundaries when preparing a national census. The Board of Guardians could instead offer ‘indoor relief’, or accommodation and care inside a Poor Law Union workhouse. Historians have found that workhouse populations came to be dominated by older men and women, and the character of the workhouse gradually changed from punitive prison into an institution predominantly providing care for older people (Ritch, 2014; Boyer, 2016; Schurer et al., 2018).

Studies have shown that older men over women were more likely to be offered indoor relief, owing to perceptions about the domesticated nature of women and their more adequate provision of child care at home (Goose, 2005). Others point to variations in age profile, where those in their seventies and eighties were more likely to be offered outdoor relief (Boyer, 2016). Their research has often been conducted without detailed reference to the life histories of actual individuals recorded in the census enumerators’ books (CEBs). Therefore, the objectives of this dataset are:

1. To reconcile the entries of those recorded in the New Poor Law source materials with their appearance in the CEBs.
2. To trace the appearance of these names across censuses to build a more comprehensive picture of the socio-economic profile of older indoor relief and outdoor relief recipients.
3. To investigate differences between older indoor relief and outdoor relief recipients.

To do this, census entries of individuals that appear in the New Poor Law source materials at two periods of their life course are transcribed. The ‘later period’ of their life course involves their circumstances when they were recorded in the census as aged 53-92 years in the periods 1881-1891. Depending on their traceability, they are then traced back to the ‘earlier period’ of their life course, where the individuals were recorded in the census as aged between 21-68 years in the periods 1851-1861. This dataset was used in a paper written by the present author, which focused on an assessment of 489 individuals recorded as living in domestic households that were traceable in both the ‘later period’ 1881-1891 and the ‘earlier period’ 1851-1861. Descriptive and logistic regression techniques measured the likelihood of receiving indoor and outdoor relief via occupational structure, migration, and the extent of relatives in the household (Heritage, 2022). A copy of the paper, presented at the British Society for Population Studies Annual Conference, University of Winchester, 5-7 September 2022, is available on request at HeritageTomS@aol.com Note that when ‘names’ are mentioned, they were only transcribed as part of the initial data collection, and are not released to the UK Data Service. Instead, each individual is distinguished by an anonymized ID code.

The study of old age in history has generally had a narrow focus on welfare needs. Specific studies of the extreme poverty, or pauperism, of older people in late nineteenth-century London by Victorian contemporary Charles Booth (1840-1916) have remained remarkably influential for historical research on old age (Booth, 1894; Boyer and Schmidle, 2009). Old age is also examined through institutional care, particularly workhouse accommodation (Lievers, 2009; Ritch, 2014), while the subgroup of the elderly population that were not poor has been underexplored. However, my PhD thesis shows that pauperism was not a universal experience of old age between 1851 and 1911. Using transcribed census data for five selected counties in England and Wales, I find that pauperism was contingent upon many socio-economic factors recorded in census datasets, such as the occupational structure of older people, their living arrangements and their capacity to voluntarily retire from work based on their savings, land and capital. I find that, in some districts of the northern counties of Cheshire...

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The paper Udny Yule read to the Royal Statistical Society at the end of the nineteenth century (Yule, 1899) was a landmark in social statistics. He applied multiple regression analysis to a question of social policy, namely reforms to the 19th century system of poverty alleviation in England. To do this, Yule created a dataset from administrative and Census data. Yule’s original dataset was not preserved, but because his data were drawn from public sources, it is possible to reconstruct it, albeit with some slight differences from the original. This report provides a description of how the dataset was reconstructed and how it varies from the one used in the 1899 paper.

In Britain in the early 1890s, a smallpox epidemic spread across the country and infected thousands. While the death rate was just a fraction of the level observed during the Great Pandemic of the 1870s, the overall death rate increased from 16 deaths in 1890 to 1,456 deaths in 1893. Among all outbreaks shown here, there were more cases among those who were vaccinated and over the age of ten than in any other group, however the death rate of the infected ranged from just one to ten percent. To put this into context, the death rates among the unvaccinated over the age of ten reached as high as forty percent in Gloucester. Unvaccinated children below ten years of age had the highest death rate among infected cases, and in the second outbreak in London, there were 148 deaths in 205 cases among unvaccinated children, whereas there were no deaths in 72 cases among vaccinated children. Another development in this pandemic was that the number of cases in children below the age of ten years was much lower than those above the age of ten; this trend that did not exist in previous centuries. A century of change In the pre-vaccination era, smallpox cases among adults were rare, as the majority of adults had contracted smallpox as children and had therefore built up a tolerance to the disease. In the early nineteenth century, the number of cases among children decreased, thanks to the protection granted to them through vaccination; however vaccination did not guarantee lifelong protection, which meant that the share of smallpox cases in young adults rose until revaccination then brought this trend back down. As we can see during these epidemics in England in the 1890s, the distribution of smallpox cases was much more representative of the population's age distribution, showing the impact and development of vaccination in its first century.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The Great Britain Historical Database has been assembled as part of the ongoing Great Britain Historical GIS Project. The project aims to trace the emergence of the north-south divide in Britain and to provide a synoptic view of the human geography of Britain at sub-county scales. Further information about the project is available on A Vision of Britain webpages, where users can browse the database's documentation system online.

Main Topics:

Parish level statistics for England, Wales and Scotland taken from the 1801, 1811, 1851, 1891, 1911, 1931 and 1951 censuses.

Parish level statistics for England and Wales taken from the 1831 and 1871 censuses.

Parish level statistics for England taken from the 1821 and 1841 censuses.

Parish level statistics for Scotland taken from the 1881 census.

Please note: this study does not include information on named individuals and would therefore not be useful for personal family history research.

This dataset contains Adjustment Weights for the 1891-1901 Scottish censuses and corresponds to Supplementary material for the paper "The Population of Non-corporate Business Proprietors in England and Wales 1891-1911", by Bennett, Robert J., Montebruno, Piero, Smith, Harry J. as an outcome of the ESRC project ES/M010953: Drivers of Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses PI Prof. Robert J. Bennett. The material consists of two raw text files 1. 1891 Employment status & Weights 2. 1901 Employment status & Weights. Each file has the three following variables: 1. RecID: the ID for I-CEM as in Higgs, Edward and Schürer, Kevin (University of Essex) (2014) The Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) UKDA, SN-7481 [data collection] UK Data Service SN: 7481 2. Employment status: 1 Worker 2 Employer 3 Own-account 3. Weights: the inverse of the probability of giving an answer to the Employment Status question of the censuses by Sex and Relationship to the head of the family. A detailed explanation of how these weights were calculated and how to use them in the context of data analysis of this censuses can be found in the accompanying working paper, Montebruno, Piero (2018) ‘Adjustment Weights 1891-1911: Weights to adjust entrepreneurs taking account of non-response and misallocation bias in Censuses 1891-1911’, Working Paper 11: ESRC project ES/M010953: ‘Drivers of Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses’, University of Cambridge, Department of Geography and Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. The files can be opened by any text editor, database management system (Access) or statistical package (Stata, SPSS). This dataset should be cited as 'Adjustment Weights 1891-1911, used for "WP 20: Preparing Scottish census data in I-CeM for the British Business Census of Entrepreneurs (BBCE) Harry Smith, Carry van Lieshout, Piero Montebruno, and Bob Bennett"' Please cite using its DOI.

ArcGIS shapefile of 288 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the fifty-five ancient counties of England and Wales as given in the 1831 census for England and Wales. As such this represents the counties of England and Wales as they were before the boundary changes caused by the Counties (Detached Parts) Act, 1844 (7 & 8 Vict. c. 61) which led to the elimination of some of the detached portions of counties.These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century. These data derive from the 173 digital maps of the boundaries of English and Welsh parishes and their subdivisions produced by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver based on the listing in the 1851 census. The maps were subsequently converted into a single GIS by Burton et al. The GIS attribute data were checked, edited and enhanced with extra data from the census by Max Satchell, Tony Wrigley and a small army of research assistants with technical support from Peter Kitson and Gill Newton. Max Satchell checked and in some cases edited the GIS polygon data using a variety of cartographic and documentary sources. Of these the most important were digital scans of the Ordnance Survey first edition 1:2500 and 1:10560 maps from the Landmark Group distributed by Edina , the series of maps of registration districts and sub-districts boundaries prepared for the Registrar General prior to the censuses of 1861, 1871 and 1891 and the description of enumeration district boundaries given in the Census Enumerators Books for the censuses from 1851, 1861 and 1871. The 1:63,360 maps and Census Enumerators Books are held in The National Archives, Kew (TNA, RG 18/3-155, 198-227, HO 107, RG 9, RG 10). The work involved changing one or more elements of information about place, parish, county, or three figure census number for 2,461 (10.8 per cent) of 22,729 lines of data in the Kain and Oliver GIS. This editing process saw the redigitisation of 644 of the 22,729 polygons, the deletion of 81 polygons, and the digitisation of 525 new polygons. The original Kain and Oliver parish and place dataset did not give details of which counties its units belonged to in 1831, though the authors did note some units had changed county under the auspices of the act of 1844. Max Satchell with help from Geoffrey Stanning and input from Peter Kitson and Tony Wrigley added the 1831 census counties as an attribute to the parish GIS primarily by systematic comparison between the censuses of 1831 and 1851 - the latter's footnotes being particularly informative concerning changes in the county boundaries. In situations where the 1831 county boundary deviated from the post-1844 alignment the polygons from the Burton et al. GIS were subdivided. At the end of this exercise all 23,177 polygons of the enhanced parish GIS could be assigned an 1831 ancient county. This attribute was then used to generate the shapefile of ancient counties.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The Great Britain Historical Database has been assembled as part of the ongoing Great Britain Historical GIS Project. The project aims to trace the emergence of the north-south divide in Britain and to provide a synoptic view of the human geography of Britain at sub-county scales. Further information about the project is available on A Vision of Britain webpages, where users can browse the database's documentation system online.

These data were originally published in the reports of the Registrar-General for England and Wales. They were computerised by the Great Britain Historical GIS Project and its collaborators. They form part of the Great Britain Historical Database, which contains a wide range of geographically-located statistics, selected to trace the emergence of the north-south divide in Britain and to provide a synoptic view of the human geography of Britain, generally at sub-county scales.

This study mainly comprises data from the RG's Annual Reports, with some data from the Quarterly Returns. A very extensive transcription from the Decennial Supplements forms a separate study.

In this pre-1911 period, the main reporting units were approximately 630 Registration Districts, grouped into Registration Counties and subdivided into around 2,000 Registration sub-Districts.

Latest edition information

For the second edition (December 2022) the previous data and documentation files were replaced with new versions, and access conditions were changed from safeguarded to open access.

Main Topics:

Annual counts of births and deaths for all Registration Districts in all years 1850 to 1910, with marriages for some years.

Annual cause-of-death data for all Registration Districts in all years, 1856 to 1910. The causes of death focus on epidemic diseases.

Annual age-specific mortality data for all Registration Districts for 1840-42, 1850-52, 1860-1882, 1890-92, 1900-02, 1908-1910 (i.e. for most of the period, census years plus immediately adjacent years).

Quarterly counts of births, deaths and selected causes of death from the Registrar-General's Quarterly Returns, for Registration sub-Districts. This is limited to (1) a full transcription of all four quarters for each census year within the period covered by the Quarterly Returns: 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901 and 1911; (2) numbers of births and infant deaths in all sub-districts in the County of London from the full run of reports from 1871 to 1911; and (3) a full transcription of all four quarters of 1876, but limited to the north-west of England, defined as Cheshire, Lancashire and Westmorland plus Chapel-en-le-Frith and Hayfield Registration Districts in Derbyshire and Saddleworth in the West Riding.

Individual cholera deaths in London in summer and autumn 1866 arranged by date and causes of death, plus a variant which is adjusted for deaths in hospitals (these data were created by Graham Mooney).

A separate UKDS study contains decennial age-specific cause of death data for all Registration Districts in all decades from 1851-60 to 1901-10.

Please note: this study does not include information on named individuals and would therefore not be useful for personal family history research.

ArcGIS shapefile of 245polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the 55 registration counties of England and Wales as given in the 1851 census. These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century. This shapefile derives from the 173 digital maps of the boundaries of English and Welsh parishes and their subdivisions produced by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver based on the listing in the 1851 census. The maps were subsequently converted into a single GIS by Burton et al. The Burton et al GIS data were checked, edited and enhanced with extra data from the census by Max Satchell, Tony Wrigley and a small army of research assistants with technical support from Peter Kitson and Gill Newton. Max Satchell checked and in some cases digitised GIS polygon data using a variety of cartographic and documentary sources. Of these the most important were digital scans of the Ordnance Survey first edition 1:2500 and 1:10560 maps from the Landmark Group distributed by Edina , the series of maps of registration districts and sub-districts boundaries prepared for the Registrar General prior to the censuses of 1861, 1871 and 1891 and the description of enumeration district boundaries given in the Census Enumerators Books for the censuses from 1851, 1861 and 1871. The 1:63,360 maps and Census Enumerators Books are held in The National Archives, Kew (TNA, RG 18/3-155, 198-227, HO 107, RG 9, RG 10).

Graph and download economic data for Wheat Production for United Kingdom (A0110AGBA393NNBR) from 1852 to 1891 about wheat, United Kingdom, and production.

BBCE data for entrepreneurs by sector for counties. The downloads include the total number of the economically active population from the BBCE broken down by sector, sex, for employers, own-account proprietors, and workers. All data are weighted for 1861 archival loss (E&W) and census non-response bias in 1891-1911.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The Great Britain Historical Database has been assembled as part of the ongoing Great Britain Historical GIS Project. The project aims to trace the emergence of the north-south divide in Britain and to provide a synoptic view of the human geography of Britain at sub-county scales. Further information about the project is available on A Vision of Britain webpages, where users can browse the database's documentation system online.

Main Topics:

Birthplace statistics from the 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses for residents of England and Wales arranged by age and sex.

Birth-Places of the Inhabitants of the Counties of Scotland in 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911, 1921, 1931 and 1951 arranged by age.

Birthplace statistics from the 1951 census for residents of England and Wales arranged by sex and districts/counties/countries.

Please note: this study does not include information on named individuals and would therefore not be useful for personal family history research.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.The Great Britain Historical Database has been assembled as part of the ongoing Great Britain Historical GIS Project. The project aims to trace the emergence of the north-south divide in Britain and to provide a synoptic view of the human geography of Britain at sub-county scales. Further information about the project is available on A Vision of Britain webpages, where users can browse the database's documentation system online. These data were originally collected by the Censuses of Population for England and Wales, and for Scotland. They were computerised by the Great Britain Historical GIS Project and its collaborators. They form part of the Great Britain Historical Database, which contains a wide range of geographically-located statistics, selected to trace the emergence of the north-south divide in Britain and to provide a synoptic view of the human geography of Britain, generally at sub-county scales. The Census of Population first gathered data on housing "density", i.e. the number of persons in each household relative to the number of rooms, in 1891, although the first year included here is 1901. In 1891, over-crowding was defined as over 2 persons per room; by 1931 this threshold had dropped to 1.5 persons; and by 1961 to 1 person per room. Up to 1931, the data for each locality and date form a table of numbers of persons against numbers of rooms, and these transcriptions sometimes exclude the rows/columns for the very largest households (see the documentation for individual tables). From 1951 onwards, simpler tables simply list numbers of households in each density category (e.g. over 1 person per room and not more than 1.5 persons). This is a new edition. Data have been added for 1911 and 1951. Wherever possible, ID numbers have been added for counties and districts which match those used in the digital boundary data created by the GBH GIS, greatly simplifying mapping.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The Great Britain Historical Database has been assembled as part of the ongoing Great Britain Historical GIS Project. The project aims to trace the emergence of the north-south divide in Britain and to provide a synoptic view of the human geography of Britain at sub-county scales. Further information about the project is available on A Vision of Britain webpages, where users can browse the database's documentation system online.

These data were originally collected by the Censuses of Population for England and Wales, and for Scotland. They were computerised by the Great Britain Historical GIS Project and its collaborators.

Like England and Wales, the Scottish census gathered data on numbers of rooms (specifically, rooms with windows) from 1891 onwards, but the reports for 1891 and 1901 tabulate only the total number of rooms for each reporting area, so it is impossible to calculate numbers living in overcrowded conditions. This study comprises extensive although not always complete transcriptions of the housing density (persons per room) tables from the Scottish censuses of 1911, 1931, 1951, 1961 and 1971, cross-tabulating numbers of persons versus numbers of rooms. The 1921 reports do include similar data for Scottish counties, but these have not been computerised.

Main Topics:

Housing Statistics (persons per room) from the 1911, 1931, 1951, 1961 and 1971 Censuses of Population.

Please note: this study does not include information on named individuals and would therefore not be useful for personal family history research.

This dataset contains the codes for the decisions in England and Wales made for each Sub-Occode to assign each individual identified by RecID to a status of employer or own account entrepreneur. (worker RecIDs are given in a separate download). This is method EMPSTATUS_NUM as outlined in the BBCE User Guide. The method is given in full in WP 9. The variables provided are: SubOccodeNo - SubOccode code SubOccode - SubOccode title 1891UR - Unrounded estimate based on 1891 data 1891R - Rounded estimate based on 1891 data 1901UR - Unrounded estimate based on 1901 data 1901R - Rounded estimate based on 1901 data 1891Ratio - Estimate based on the 1891 ratio of either entrepreneurs to workers, or employers to own account 1901Ratio - Estimate based on the 1901 ratio of either entrepreneurs to workers, or employers to own account Decision - Code indicating the option used. For 1851 EOA, E; 1861EOA, E; and 1881E five codes exist: 1-1891 unrounded; 2-1891 rounded; 3-1901 unrounded; 4-1901 rounded; 5-1891 ratio. For 1881EOA 7 codes exist: 1-1891 unrounded; 2-1891 rounded; 3-1901 unrounded; 4-1901 rounded; 5-1891 ratio; 6-1901 ratio; 7-use 1881 extracted

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The aim of the project was to study the labour supply, effort, and decisions of the workers employed at the Garesfield Bute pit in County Durham.
Main Topics:

The Victorian Household Panel Study has been compiled from four sources: the wages book and plans of Garesfield Bute pit at High Spen in County Durham, England; the Ordnance Survey map of 1895; and the 1891 Census Enumerators' Books. It contains detailed information about the households, work places and assignments, output and pay of the hewers, putters and supervisory underground workers in the pit for the period June 1890 to January 1893. For hewers, an important feature of work and society was the system of marrowing, under which they chose their own work mates, and shared earnings with them. The Panel Study permits reconstruction of the history of marrow pairings during the period June 1890 to January 1893.

Data on work places and assignments, output and pay form an unbalanced panel of observations of the behaviour of those workers who were present in the pit from time to time. Household information is drawn from the 1891 Census Enumerators' Books, and is there fore a snapshot of household structure at a single point in time.

Release 1a consists of as accurate a transcription of the Garesfield Bute wages book, without any attempt at linkage or other interpretation. Release 1b includes codes linking workers across pays, and codes linking the wages book to the other three sources. Release 2 consists of datasets derived from the previous Release 1a and Release 1b. It includes an extra variable recording travel-to-work distance.