Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM), England and Wales, 1921 study contains the standardised England and Wales data for 1921.

The Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) project has produced a standardised, integrated dataset of most of the censuses of Great Britain for the period 1851 to 1911: England and Wales for 1851-1861, 1881-1921 and Scotland for 1851-1901, and 1921 making available to academic researchers, detailed information at parish level about everyone resident in Great Britain collected at most of the decennial censuses between 1851-1921.

The name and address details for individuals are not currently included in the database; for reasons of commercial sensitivity, these are held under Special Licence access conditions under SN 9281 Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) Names and Addresses, England and Wales, 1921: Special Licence Access. See the catalogue record for 9281 for instructions on how to apply for those data.

These data are available via an online system at https://icem.ukdataservice.ac.uk/

Further information about I-CeM can be found on the I-CeM Integrated Microdata Project webpages.

Main Topics:

The data contain information on age, gender, household structure and composition, occupation, employer, place of work, education, marital status, birthplace and nationality. Further details are also available for those enumerated in institutions (including vessels and barracks).

This dataset contains Adjustment Weights for the 1891-1911 England and Wales 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 three raw text files

1. 1891 Employment status & Weights
2. 1901 Employment status & Weights
3. 1911 Employment status & Weights

Each file has the three following variables:

1. newRecID: the ID for I-CEM2 as in Higgs, Edward and Schürer, Kevin (University of Essex) (2014) The Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) UKDA, SN-7481; K. Schürer, E. Higgs, A.M. Reid, E.M Garrett, Integrated Census Microdata, 1851-1911, version V. 2 (I-CeM.2), (2016) [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, "The Population of Non-corporate Business Proprietors in England and Wales 1891-1911", by Bennett, Robert J., Montebruno, Piero, Smith, Harry J. Please cite using its DOI.

The Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) project has produced a standardised, integrated dataset of most of the censuses of Great Britain for the period 1851 to 1921: England and Wales for 1851-1861, 1881-1921 and Scotland for 1851-1901 and 1921, making available to academic researchers, detailed information at parish level about everyone resident in Great Britain collected at most of the decennial censuses between 1851-1921. Users should note that the 1871 England and Wales census data and 1911 Scottish census data are not available via I-CeM.

The original digital data has been coded and standardised. In addition, the original text and numerical strings have always been preserved in separate variables, so that researchers can go back to the original transcription. However, users should note that name and address details for individuals are not currently included in the database; for reasons of commercial sensitivity, these are held under Special Licence access conditions under SN 7856 for data relating to England, Wales and Scotland, 1851-1911 and SN 9281 for data relating to England and Wales, 1921.

This study (7481) relates to the available anonymised data for 1851-1911, i.e. all available years except 1921. Data for England and Wales 1921 are available under SN 9280. The data are available via an online system at https://icem.ukdataservice.ac.uk/

Latest edition information

For the second edition (June 2024), the 1851-1911 data have been redeposited with amended and enhanced data values.

Further information about I-CeM can be found on the "https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/icem/" target="_blank"> I-CeM Integrated Microdata Project webpages.

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.

This dataset contains a variety of demographic measures (related to fertility, marriage, mortality and migration), plus a range of socio-economic indicators (related to households, age structure, and social class) for the 2000+ Registration Sub Districts (RSDs) in England and Wales for each census year between 1851 and 1911, and for the 600+ Registration Districts of Scotland 1851-1901. The measures have mainly been derived from the computerised individual level census enumerators' books (and household schedules for 1911) enhanced under the I-CeM project. I-CeM does not currently include data for England and Wales 1871, although the project has been able to access a version of the data for that year it does not contain information necessary to calculate many of the variables presented here. Scotland 1911 is also not available. Users should therefore beware that 1871 does not contain data for many of the variables. Additional data has been derived from the tables summarising numbers of births and deaths by year and areas, which were published by the Registrar General of England and Wales in his quarterly, annual and decennial reports of births, deaths and marriages. Data from the decennial reports was obtained from Woods (SN 3552) and we transcribed data from the quarterly and annual reports ourselves. Counts of births and deaths for Scottish Registration Districts were obtained from the Digitising Scotland project at the University of Edinburgh. The dataset builds on SN 8613 and SN 853547 which provide data for a more limited set of variables and for England and Wales only (the same dataset also has two UKDS SN numbers as it was re-routed by UKDS during the deposit process).

This project will present the first historic population geography of Great Britain during the late nineteenth century. This was a period of unprecedented demographic change, when both mortality and fertility started the dramatic secular declines of the first demographic transition. National trends are well established: mortality decline started in childhood and early adulthood, with infant mortality lagging behind, particularly in urban-industrial areas. The fall in fertility was led by the middle classes but quickly spread throughout society. Urban growth was fuelled by movement from the countryside to the city, but there was also considerable migration overseas, particularly from Scotland, although to some extent outmigration was offset by immigration. There was local and regional variation in these patterns, and a contrast between the demographic experiences of Scotland and of England and Wales. Marriage was later in Scotland but fertility within marriage higher, and the improvement in Scottish mortality was slower than that south of the border. However, while there has been research on local and regional patterns within each country, these have mainly been pursued separately, and it is therefore unclear whether there were real national differences or whether there were local demographic continuities across borders, and if so whether they followed economic, occupational, cultural or even linguistic lines. Understanding population processes involves a holistic appreciation of the interaction between the basic demographic components of fertility, mortality, nuptiality and migration, and how they come together, interacting with economic and cultural processes, to create a specific demographic system via the spread of people and ideas. This project is the first to consider a historical population geography of the whole of Great Britain across the first demographic transition, drawing together measures of nuptiality, fertility, mortality and migration for small geographic areas and unpacking how they interacted to produce the more readily available broad-brush national patterns for Scotland and for England and Wales.

We will build on our immensely successful project on the fertility of Victorian England and Wales, which used complete count census data for England and Wales to calculate more detailed fertility measures than ever previously possible for some 2000 small geographic areas and 8 social groups, allowing the investigation of intra-urban as well as urban-rural differences in fertility. The new measures allowed us to examine age patterns of fertility across the two countries for the first time. We were also able to calculate contextual variables from the census data which allowed us to undertake spatial analysis of the influences on fertility over time. As well as academic papers, our previous project presented summary data at a fine spatial resolution in an interactive online atlas, populationspast.org, a major new resource which is already being widely used as a teaching tool in both schools and universities.

In this new project we will calculate comparable measures of fertility and contextual variables using the full count census data for Scotland, 1851 to 1901 inclusive, to complement those for England and Wales....

This Special Licence access dataset contains names and addresses from the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) dataset of the censuses of Great Britain for the period 1851 to 1911. These data are made available under Special Licence (SL) access conditions due to commercial sensitivity.

The anonymised main I-CeM database that complements these names and addresses is available under SN 7481. It comprises the Censuses of Great Britain for the period 1851-1911; data are available for England and Wales for 1851-1861 and 1881-1911 (1871 is not currently available for England and Wales) and for Scotland for 1851-1901 (1911 is not currently available for Scotland). The database contains over 180 million individual census records and was digitised and harmonised from the original census enumeration books. It details characteristics for all individuals resident in Great Britain at each of the included Censuses. The original digital data has been coded and standardised; the I-CeM database has consistent geography over time and standardised coding schemes for many census variables.

This dataset of names and addresses for individual census records is organised per country (England and Wales; Scotland) and per census year. Within each data file each census record contains first and last name, street address and an individual identification code (RecID) that allows linking with the corresponding anonymised I-CeM record. The data cannot be used for true linking of individual census records across census years for commercial genealogy purposes nor for any other commercial purposes. The SL arrangements are required to ensure that commercial sensitivity is protected. For information on making an application, see the Access section.

The data were updated in February 2020, with some files redeposited with longer field length limits. Users should note that some name and address fields are truncated due to the limits set by the LDS project that transcribed the original data. No more than 10,000 records out of some 210 million across the study should be affected. Examples include:

• England and Wales:
  • 1851 - truncated at the 24th character (maximum I-CeM field length 95 characters)
  • 1881 - truncated at the 16th character (maximum I-CeM field length 50 characters).
• Scotland: for 1851‐71, truncations affect less than 0.01% of all addresses and for 1851 around 1% at most
  • 1851 - truncated at the 70th character
  • 1861 - truncated at the 76th character
  • 1871 - truncated at the 82th character
  • 1881 - truncated at the 50th character.

Further information about I-CeM can be found on the I-CeM Integrated Microdata Project and I-CeM Guide webpages.

This dataset is designed to be used with the Integrated Census Micro-data (ICeM). It weights to adjust for the number of missing women in each Registration Sub-District (RSD) for every census year. More information is given in 'Weights to adjust for missing women in ICeM database 1851-1911 README' file.

This dataset contains RecID from I-CeM Adjustment Weights for the 1891-1911 England and Wales 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 three raw text files 1. 1891 Employment status & Weights 2. 1901 Employment status & Weights 3. 1911 Employment status & Weights Each file has the three following variables: 1. RecID: the ID for I-CEM2 as in Higgs, Edward and Schürer, Kevin (University of Essex) (2014) The Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) UKDA, SN-7481; K. Schürer, E. Higgs, A.M. Reid, E.M Garrett, Integrated Census Microdata, 1851-1911, version V. 2 (I-CeM.2), (2016) [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, "The Population of Non-corporate Business Proprietors in England and Wales 1891-1911", by Bennett, Robert J., Montebruno, Piero, Smith, Harry J. Please cite using its DOI.

These digital boundaries were created by the Great Britain Historical GIS Project and 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.

They represent the boundaries of Registration Districts in England and Wales as in use at the date of each Census of Population between 1851 and 1911, 1911 being the last census to report extensively on these units.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

This data collection uses Census returns to construct a consistent time series of population for urban centres in England and Wales 1801-1911. This allows the urban development and structure of England and Wales to be analysed, and provides a resource to other researchers seeking to make ready comparisons of other information with urban development across the nineteenth century. It has been derived from the work of three previous researchers: (1) Chris Law (1967) originally prepared it; (2) Brian Robson (1973) developed the data further and transcribed Law’s data and preserved it, and also added information on some smaller settlements for years before they became ‘urban’ under Law’s criteria; (3) Jack Langton (2000) undertook a different study for the 17th century to 1841 using the same basic methods and definitions as Law-Robson for 1801 and 1841 and corrected various errors and omissions in the Law-Robson material; he also disaggregated the Law-Robson data for the period to 1841 to reflect the fact that many places had not coalesced into large towns by this date. The database here combines these three sources. It was prepared by Bob Bennett (2011) for a study of local economies and chamber of commerce business representation.

This download goves updated with RecID Adjustment Weights for the 1891-1911 England and Wales 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 three raw text files 1. 1891 Employment status & Weights 2. 1901 Employment status & Weights 3. 1911 Employment status & Weights Each file has the three following variables: 1. RecID: the ID for I-CEM2 as in Higgs, Edward and Schürer, Kevin (University of Essex) (2014) The Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) UKDA, SN-7481; K. Schürer, E. Higgs, A.M. Reid, E.M Garrett, Integrated Census Microdata, 1851-1911, version V. 2 (I-CeM.2), (2016) [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, "The Population of Non-corporate Business Proprietors in England and Wales 1891-1911", by Bennett, Robert J., Montebruno, Piero, Smith, Harry J. Please cite using its DOI.

This dataset constitutes a sample of individuals resident in nineteenth and early twentieth century workhouses (residential institutions for the poor). These data were collected for preliminary investigations of the demographic characteristics of the workhouse-resident population between 1851 and 1911, as part of wider research by Samantha Williams on the workhouse. The sample represents between 45% and 78% of the entire England and Wales workhouse population reported for each decennial Census from 1851 to 1911 but not including 1871, and comprises complete enumerations of between 400 and 730 workhouses. Additionally there is a 10% subsample of workhouses present in every Census year. This dataset is derived from Schurer and Higgs' Integrated Census Microdata dataset held at the UK Data Archive, which comprises all persons enumerated in the England and Wales Censuses of 1851 through 1911, not including 1871, and may be linked to that resource.

The workhouse was a central feature of the new poor law (1834-1948), intended to house, feed and occupy those unable to provide for themselves, in a controlled environment. Parishes were grouped into some 600 poor law unions. By 1841 around 320 new workhouses had been built, and by 1870 some 520, whilst other unions adapted existing workhouses. The purpose of this project was to build an evidential foundation for the first really comprehensive and systematic study of workhouse populations, providing a nationwide picture of the institutionalised poor from 1851 until 1911, using data extracted from the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) digitised England and Wales decennial population census dataset, UKDA study number 7481. A subsample of workhouses that were successfully extracted from every available Census enables closer study of trends over time. This research forms part of a larger study on the workhouse being undertaken by Samantha Williams, including analysis of pauper offences and punishments in selected workhouses.

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.

Nepal Population Census data was reported at 29,164,578.000 Person in 2021. This records an increase from the previous number of 26,494,504.000 Person for 2011. Nepal Population Census data is updated yearly, averaging 10,484,489.500 Person from Dec 1911 (Median) to 2021, with 12 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 29,164,578.000 Person in 2021 and a record low of 5,532,574.000 Person in 1930. Nepal Population Census data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Central Bureau of Statistics. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Nepal – Table NP.G001: Population Census.

These data have been generated as part of the work being undertaken by the Kingston Local History Project. The aim of this project is to create a comprehensive database covering the people who lived, worked and died in Kingston upon Thames between 1850 and 1911. The core of the database is the census enumerators' returns for each census year between 1851 and 1891, supplemented by vital registration sources such as parish registers (baptisms, marriages and burials) and the local authority cemetery records.

Analysis of the data is providing a wealth of information on such questions as occupational structures; class profiles; household structures; demographic trends etc., and indicating how these changed over time. For example, this burial database has provided a great deal of material on mortality in Kingston between 1850 and 1911, including the age profile of mortality (in particular highlighting the high and increasing incidence of infant mortality), and the seasonality of mortality. By linking these data to other sources such as the census enumerators' books, maps and Medical Officer of Health reports, we can examine the influence of such factors as location, housing conditions, father's occupation (in the case of infants) etc. on mortality.

This dataset contains the RecID for each individual who was a worker 1851-1911 in England and Wales census, for 1851-81 according to the IND reconstruction process and their I-CeM occupation code (occode) cleaned and changed as part of the BBCE creation process. Data: RecID (I-CeM unique identifier) Occode (I-CeM occupation code cleaned by BBCE). March 2020 updated files.

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.

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 provides a range of demographic and socio-economic variables for Registration Sub-Districts (RSDs) in England and Wales, 1851-1911. The measures have mainly been derived from the computerised individual level census enumerators' books (and household schedules for 1911) for England and Wales enhanced under the I-CeM project. I-CeM does not currently include data for 1871, although the project has been able to access a version of the data for that year it does not contain information necessary to calculate many of the variables presented here. Users should therefore beware that 1871 does not contain data for many of the variables. Additional data, for some indicators, has been derived from the tables summarising numbers of births and deaths by year and areas, which were published by the Registrar General in his quarterly, annual and decennial reports of births, deaths and marriages. More information on the data, including overviews of the geographical patterns and changes over time, can be found on the Populations Past – Atlas of Victorian and Edwardian Population website, which provides an interactive mapping facility for these data.

The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of major change in the dynamics of the British population. This was a time of transformation from a relatively 'high pressure' demographic regime characterised by medium to high birth and death rates towards a 'low pressure' regime of low birth and death rates, a transformation known as the 'demographic transition'. This transition was not uniform across England and Wales: certain places and social groups appear to have led the declines while others lagged behind. Exploring these geographical patterns can provide insights into the process of change and the influence of economic and geographical factors. This project aimed to utilise the individual-level data of the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) project to calculate age-specific fertility rates both for a range of fine geographical units covering England and Wales and for occupational groups and then to investigate the relationships between these rates and other socioeconomic variables. This was to provide, for the first time, widespread information of the age patterns of fertility which render insight into ‘starting’, ‘spacing’ or ‘stopping’ fertility regulating behaviour. A time series of such measures across geographical and social space is also vital when trying to identify how new forms of behaviour spread through the population. This database contains a variety of measures of fertility, marriage and infant and child mortality, and also a range of socio-economic indicators (related to households, age structure, and social class) for the 2000+ Registration Sub Districts (RSDs) in both England and Wales, for each census year between 1851 and 1871. Most of these data can be mapped using our interactive website www.populationspast.org.

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.