Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GBHGIS)

Variability of the marriage rate, 1841-70

Simply identifying which parts of the country suffered the most severe economic hardship before 1914 is problematic. The Poor Law system was deliberately penal and suffers from other problems noted below, and the Trade Union Percentage of Unemployment, although widely used in aggregate studies of the national economy, was based on a relatively narrow group of workers, mainly artisans.

In a 1993 Economic History Review paper to which we contributed, Paul Johnson argued that small debt statistics were a better guide. Our paper, 'A good time to wed', which appeared in the February 1996 EcHR, argues that the marriage rate is an even more broadly based measure which varied closely with the trade union unemployment rate, while both differed substantially from the debt rate.

A further advantage of the marriage rate is that usable data are available for the whole country at early dates. It is the variability of the rate which is a measure of the vulnerability of a locality to cyclical distress, and therefore this map, which was not available for inclusion in our 1996 article, plots the variance of the crude marriage rate for individual registration districts; to reduce the effects of year-on-year variation unrelated to the business cycle, each series was first smoothed by applying a centred three-term moving average.

Districts which did not exist for the full 30 year period are excluded, while some districts affected by substantial boundary changes remain and may confuse the pattern. Even so, districts with high variances are generally concentrated in the north and in urban areas.