Employment

Reforms initiated by the 1870 Education Act had yet to impact when the 1871 census was taken. A fifth of 10-15 year olds worked full-time, a situation barely changed since 1851. Though the number of under-tens in work had had almost halved since then, at least 22,000 such youngsters still remained at work.

Some rural commentators even thought the problem 'a growing evil', to quote a Norfolk school inspector, describing boys 'taken for farm labour often at 7 or 8 years old'.

One clergyman even threatened to close his church's free school, forcing farmers to pay for a new Board School out of local taxes, unless they stopped employing children. The number of working children was actually underestimated by the census. Comparison with the 1871 official Educational Returns in three Devon villages, for example, reveals 40% fewer 'scholars' in school than the census listed.

The census also misrepresented the nature of the labour force in office work and retailing. Apart from insurance and bank workers, 'clerks' were simply added to the overall numbers for their employer's industry: so cotton mill wage clerks were lumped with the textile industries.

Likewise, many 'servants' listed in shopkeepers' households would have been shop workers. In Making Sense of the Census (2005), a must-read for any serious family historian, Edward Higgs suggests the census may have under-estimated these increasingly important sectors of the economy by as much as 16%. That would represent 380,000, mainly women, workers.

Similarly, the nearly 1.5 million female domestic servants included a large number who were housekeepers of their own or a close relative's home. There is still no doubt, however, that domestic service was the biggest single source of paid employment for women, almost double the size of the textile industries' female workforce.

And what of the so-called 'oldest profession'? Enumerators' books contain many examples of single women whose occupation was listed as 'fallen' or 'unfortunate'. One Exeter official even appears to have used 'dressmaker' as a euphemism, but the census authorities ignored all such entries, never providing total numbers for prostitutes; and presumably most such women never hinted how they scraped a living.

However, other trends in the economy were more-accurately represented. This was 'the age of improvement', reflected in a 50% growth (to some 18,000 workers) in the gas, electricity and water supply industries. Building and construction were also booming with a 20% leap to 716,000 workers. Intriguingly some 4,000 of them were female.

Malcolm Chase