Nutrition and Health, 1992, Vol. 8, pp. 223-226 0260-1060/92 $10 © 1992 A B Academic Publishers, Printed in Great Britain
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LEITER-WHY DID ENGLAND & WALES SUFFER ACCELERATED POPULATION DECLINE IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY? Sir, I would like to suggest that it was a dietary deficiency of Vitamin E that was responsible for the accelerated decline in the birth rate of England & Wales in the last quarter of the 19th century, rather than an increased use of mechanical methods of birth control. It is often blandly assumed that, in comparison with the 17th century, birth control was more widely practised in the late 19th century, and that this was the most important factor. However, it is often overlooked that for working-class Victorian families, modern birth control techniques were simply too expensive. In 1889, skilled tradesmen-carpenters, joiners and bricklayers for instance, though earning 9d per hour, tended to be employed on short-term jobs, separately negotiated. General labourers, even less secure, commanded 51/ 2d per hour, police constables in the rural Borders made 24s for a 54 hour week, while Scottish coal hewers' pay was 5s per 12 hour day, averaging three shifts a week. 1 So it may be seen that the prices for contraceptives in advertisements carried in The Wife's Handbook were beyond the means of all but the best paid men, and only those in regular employment. A variety of items were offered including a selection of india-rubber 'letters' (condoms) at 5s per dozen, made by Bagley's of Nottingham, and sold by W.H. Smith, 30 Bookseller's Row, Strand, London; diaphragms in three sizes were 4s each and Rendell's dissolving pessaries containing quinine cost 2s per dozen. 2 The Wife's Handbook was a treatise written by Dr H.A. All butt and published in 1889. He sought to instruct wives and mothers in the complicated and delicate balance of maintaining a healthy and happy family covering the familiar ground of cleanliness, warmth, rest and good nutrition. But chapter 7, dealing with family limitation in explicit terms attracted the attention of the G.M.C. who, in their wrath, struck Dr Allbutt off the Medical Register, giving the rather strange reason that the book was too low in price, i.e. too easily available. Dr Allbutt spent 10 years in the medical wilderness, fighting his case until re-instated by a more enlightened establishment. Meanwhile, the book went into several editions, and there is some evidence to suggest that Tyneside pattern-makers and boilermakers, the aristocrats of heavy industry, in steady full-time work on 37-38s per week, did seek to restrict their family size. Downloaded from nah.sagepub.com at MCMASTER UNIV LIBRARY on March 17, 2015
224
And yet, in this bigoted social climate of the last quarter of the C19 when ignorance and fear stultified the best efforts of concerned professional men, an influence was brought to bear, so fundamental and so widespread in urban and rural areas alike, that fertility was reduced nation-wide inadvertently, by an unknown unsuspected process, and even a century later in our own time, barely acknowledged or recognised. The drop was obvious and startling, reflected in plummeting birth rates among the artisan and labouring classes. 3 Many eminent demographers have tried to explain this phenomenon using a plethora of statistical analyses, rhythmic swerves, assessments, cyclical patterns, expositions contrived round the mere possibilities of epidemic, elegant theories devised and developed by Messrs Schofield, Eversley, Armstrong, Laslett et ai,4 but any reference to the far-reaching effects of a changed pattern of nutritional values is notably absent. Only Wrigley in Population and History5 observes, almost en passant, 'that perhaps the differing diets may have an effect on fecundability in different populations'. But he does not expand on this theme, nor refer to it again, and subsequently it does not seem to have received any appreciable, detailed attention. His resolution of all these imponderables into but one cause, i.e. the increased use of coitus interruptus, seems inadequate. A common sense interpretation suggests a multiplicity of contributory factors. The plain fact, unencumbered by hypothesis or theory, is that people in the C17 and C19 consumed very different types and qualities of food. One of the most important areas of difference between the two eras under discussion was the production of bread flour. In a pre-industrial England, when bread constituted 3/ 4 of the working family's diet, 8 wheat was scythereaped, stooked in the field, hand winnowed and finally, stoneground in the local mill. This process crushes the ear in its entirety between two flat circular stones dispersing the wheat-germ oil, strong in Vitamin E, into the main body of the flour, rendering a whole, entire and perfect product to the consumer. This bread, retaining its full complement of trace elements, was rough and nutritious, but because of its brown colour, became increasingly despised. As always, the colour white was equated with refinement and purity, and many extraction processes were devised to produce a white loaf, mainly by sieving the brown flour through a series of differently meshed gauzes. But this was a slow laborious procedure and so expensive that the white loaf was only available to the wealthy. That it was completely lacking in its previous nutritive qualities was not understood by most of its consumers, but the deficiencies did not go unobserved or unremarked by eminent, concerned people of the day. One of the many was Dr T.R. Allinson, a medical doctor whose fashionable Hanover Square practice subsidised an almost free clinic in Bethnal Green. His alarmed response to poor bread and food content led to his founding the Food Reform League in 1880, a cause which attracted Bernard Shaw and his coterie. Downloaded from nah.sagepub.com at MCMASTER UNIV LIBRARY on March 17, 2015
225
The League's basic tenets of pure, plain unadulterated ingredients were sound, and had a widespread public dispersal in the shape of penny and tuppeny tracts, in the custom of the day, but the series also contained such titles as 'Gonorrhoea, the clap', 'A Note on Chastity For Young Men', 'Meat is Lust', etc., so the good food news was somewhat obscured in the public consciousness by an associated rejection ofthe socially unacceptable topics, and the important message concerning the excellence of wholemeal was lost, dismissed as the ravings of cranks. Nevertheless, Dr Allinson battled on. Indeed, he felt so strongly about the advantages of wholemeal that he agitated for legislation forbidding the separation of bran from fine flour, publishing a leaflet promoting his cause in simple recipes using the unadulterated product. Parliament was unimpressed, but the League eventually translated into the Natural Food Co, under which banner 100% wholemeal stoneground flour was milled and marketed, and is still in existence today, though amalgamated into a larger conglomerate. Other valuable constituents were lost too. In breeding longer stalks to accommodate higher cutting edges on newly-introduced mechanical reaping machines, early plant geneticists eliminated much of the original protein from the wheat ear. 10 Not until the discovery of vitamins in 1912 were these conclusions recorded. But in the last quarter of the C 19, unsatisfactory bread was not the only part of the story. Other foodstuffs containing vitamin E fell prey to the depredations of Victorian cuisine. Leafy vegetables such as cabbage were boiled with soda to extinction for 20 minutes, and lettuce, a particularly rich source, was rarely taken, as the taste for salads had not yet evolved. Meals were heavy, stodgy and filling. Suet dumplings, boiled rice, sago, tapioca and semolina all contributed to the scourge of the late Victorian era-permanent constipation. Newspapers of the day abounded in advertisements for patent medicines to remedy all manner of aches and pains, termed cure-ails, most of which contained laudanum (opium), not then a proscribed drug, but whose constipatory effects were well known. Most housewives however, relied on senna pods and cascara sagrada for the essential weekly purge for their families. Both of these are abortificients. Their visceral assault after ingestion, amplifies the contractions of the large intestinal wall, a situation which all too easily transfers to the uterus, inducing many an inadvertent miscarriage at all stages of a pregnancy. In the late C 17, however, abortificients were used specifically Y Knowledge of them was retained in the received wisdom of folk-medicine. Meadow and hedgerow plants including rue, juniper, barberry, sage, wormwood, tansy and greater celandine, each containing anthraquinone laxatives as constituents, were freely available to any who wished to pick and process them, and were administered solely to terminate pregnancies. Warnings in old herbals were discrete enough to distinguish which abortificient plants, then called emmenogues, might harm the foetus, and Downloaded from nah.sagepub.com at MCMASTER UNIV LIBRARY on March 17, 2015
226
which could be used solely to instigate labour. So, techniques of abortion in the C17 were not random-they were explicit and targetted; whereas, in the C19, apart from minimal mechanical interventions, they were universally inflicted through an unknown dietary imposition on a credulous population. Almonds and hazel nuts, another rich source of vitamin E were also part of the C 17 staple diet, albeit seasonally, but only presented on the Victorian table as part of the Christmas fare; could it be that this temporary lifting of the vitamin E level may have reflected a mini-surge in the statistics for late C19 birth rates? Perhaps some enterprising demographer will investigate this possibility. Altogether, I consider that diet, although not solely responsible, forms an important and often overlooked element of this story. It was not until the first decade of the C20 with improved health standards and enforced hygiene regulations, and when the Secondary Education Act of 1902 introduced an optimistic expectation of children's ability to progress into white-collar jobs, that Mr and Mrs Average Parent were provided with an incentive, and actively and knowingly sought to limit the size of their families.
REFERENCES 1. Labour Statistics. Returns of Wages, 1830-90. Board of Trade, H.M.S.O. 1887. 2. Allbutt, H.A. MRCP. E. LSA. The Wife's Handbook, R.H. Forder. London. 3. Reports of the Registrar-General. (34th: 1871; 44th: 1881) Birth Statistics. (Historical Series: FM1, no:l3). H.M.S.O. 4. Laslett, Peter, et al. English Historical Demography. Weidenfeld 1966. 5. Wrigley, E.A. Population and History. World University Library. 1969. 6. Neale, R.S. Class in English History. Blackwell 1981. 7. Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost. Methuen. 1965. 8. Burnett, John. Plenty and Want. Nelson 1966. 9. Ibid. p. 105. 10. Johnston, J. A Hundred Years Eating. McGill and Macmillan 1977. 11. Davies Stephen & Stewart A. Nutritional Medicine. Pan Books. 1987. 12. Mills, S. Dictionary of Modern Herbalism. Thorson. 1985.
*Deirdre Verrinder 2 Haarlem Road, Brook Green London W 14 OJL
*Mrs Verrinder is a genealogist and family historian.
Downloaded from nah.sagepub.com at MCMASTER UNIV LIBRARY on March 17, 2015
223
LEITER-WHY DID ENGLAND & WALES SUFFER ACCELERATED POPULATION DECLINE IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY? Sir, I would like to suggest that it was a dietary deficiency of Vitamin E that was responsible for the accelerated decline in the birth rate of England & Wales in the last quarter of the 19th century, rather than an increased use of mechanical methods of birth control. It is often blandly assumed that, in comparison with the 17th century, birth control was more widely practised in the late 19th century, and that this was the most important factor. However, it is often overlooked that for working-class Victorian families, modern birth control techniques were simply too expensive. In 1889, skilled tradesmen-carpenters, joiners and bricklayers for instance, though earning 9d per hour, tended to be employed on short-term jobs, separately negotiated. General labourers, even less secure, commanded 51/ 2d per hour, police constables in the rural Borders made 24s for a 54 hour week, while Scottish coal hewers' pay was 5s per 12 hour day, averaging three shifts a week. 1 So it may be seen that the prices for contraceptives in advertisements carried in The Wife's Handbook were beyond the means of all but the best paid men, and only those in regular employment. A variety of items were offered including a selection of india-rubber 'letters' (condoms) at 5s per dozen, made by Bagley's of Nottingham, and sold by W.H. Smith, 30 Bookseller's Row, Strand, London; diaphragms in three sizes were 4s each and Rendell's dissolving pessaries containing quinine cost 2s per dozen. 2 The Wife's Handbook was a treatise written by Dr H.A. All butt and published in 1889. He sought to instruct wives and mothers in the complicated and delicate balance of maintaining a healthy and happy family covering the familiar ground of cleanliness, warmth, rest and good nutrition. But chapter 7, dealing with family limitation in explicit terms attracted the attention of the G.M.C. who, in their wrath, struck Dr Allbutt off the Medical Register, giving the rather strange reason that the book was too low in price, i.e. too easily available. Dr Allbutt spent 10 years in the medical wilderness, fighting his case until re-instated by a more enlightened establishment. Meanwhile, the book went into several editions, and there is some evidence to suggest that Tyneside pattern-makers and boilermakers, the aristocrats of heavy industry, in steady full-time work on 37-38s per week, did seek to restrict their family size. Downloaded from nah.sagepub.com at MCMASTER UNIV LIBRARY on March 17, 2015
224
And yet, in this bigoted social climate of the last quarter of the C19 when ignorance and fear stultified the best efforts of concerned professional men, an influence was brought to bear, so fundamental and so widespread in urban and rural areas alike, that fertility was reduced nation-wide inadvertently, by an unknown unsuspected process, and even a century later in our own time, barely acknowledged or recognised. The drop was obvious and startling, reflected in plummeting birth rates among the artisan and labouring classes. 3 Many eminent demographers have tried to explain this phenomenon using a plethora of statistical analyses, rhythmic swerves, assessments, cyclical patterns, expositions contrived round the mere possibilities of epidemic, elegant theories devised and developed by Messrs Schofield, Eversley, Armstrong, Laslett et ai,4 but any reference to the far-reaching effects of a changed pattern of nutritional values is notably absent. Only Wrigley in Population and History5 observes, almost en passant, 'that perhaps the differing diets may have an effect on fecundability in different populations'. But he does not expand on this theme, nor refer to it again, and subsequently it does not seem to have received any appreciable, detailed attention. His resolution of all these imponderables into but one cause, i.e. the increased use of coitus interruptus, seems inadequate. A common sense interpretation suggests a multiplicity of contributory factors. The plain fact, unencumbered by hypothesis or theory, is that people in the C17 and C19 consumed very different types and qualities of food. One of the most important areas of difference between the two eras under discussion was the production of bread flour. In a pre-industrial England, when bread constituted 3/ 4 of the working family's diet, 8 wheat was scythereaped, stooked in the field, hand winnowed and finally, stoneground in the local mill. This process crushes the ear in its entirety between two flat circular stones dispersing the wheat-germ oil, strong in Vitamin E, into the main body of the flour, rendering a whole, entire and perfect product to the consumer. This bread, retaining its full complement of trace elements, was rough and nutritious, but because of its brown colour, became increasingly despised. As always, the colour white was equated with refinement and purity, and many extraction processes were devised to produce a white loaf, mainly by sieving the brown flour through a series of differently meshed gauzes. But this was a slow laborious procedure and so expensive that the white loaf was only available to the wealthy. That it was completely lacking in its previous nutritive qualities was not understood by most of its consumers, but the deficiencies did not go unobserved or unremarked by eminent, concerned people of the day. One of the many was Dr T.R. Allinson, a medical doctor whose fashionable Hanover Square practice subsidised an almost free clinic in Bethnal Green. His alarmed response to poor bread and food content led to his founding the Food Reform League in 1880, a cause which attracted Bernard Shaw and his coterie. Downloaded from nah.sagepub.com at MCMASTER UNIV LIBRARY on March 17, 2015
225
The League's basic tenets of pure, plain unadulterated ingredients were sound, and had a widespread public dispersal in the shape of penny and tuppeny tracts, in the custom of the day, but the series also contained such titles as 'Gonorrhoea, the clap', 'A Note on Chastity For Young Men', 'Meat is Lust', etc., so the good food news was somewhat obscured in the public consciousness by an associated rejection ofthe socially unacceptable topics, and the important message concerning the excellence of wholemeal was lost, dismissed as the ravings of cranks. Nevertheless, Dr Allinson battled on. Indeed, he felt so strongly about the advantages of wholemeal that he agitated for legislation forbidding the separation of bran from fine flour, publishing a leaflet promoting his cause in simple recipes using the unadulterated product. Parliament was unimpressed, but the League eventually translated into the Natural Food Co, under which banner 100% wholemeal stoneground flour was milled and marketed, and is still in existence today, though amalgamated into a larger conglomerate. Other valuable constituents were lost too. In breeding longer stalks to accommodate higher cutting edges on newly-introduced mechanical reaping machines, early plant geneticists eliminated much of the original protein from the wheat ear. 10 Not until the discovery of vitamins in 1912 were these conclusions recorded. But in the last quarter of the C 19, unsatisfactory bread was not the only part of the story. Other foodstuffs containing vitamin E fell prey to the depredations of Victorian cuisine. Leafy vegetables such as cabbage were boiled with soda to extinction for 20 minutes, and lettuce, a particularly rich source, was rarely taken, as the taste for salads had not yet evolved. Meals were heavy, stodgy and filling. Suet dumplings, boiled rice, sago, tapioca and semolina all contributed to the scourge of the late Victorian era-permanent constipation. Newspapers of the day abounded in advertisements for patent medicines to remedy all manner of aches and pains, termed cure-ails, most of which contained laudanum (opium), not then a proscribed drug, but whose constipatory effects were well known. Most housewives however, relied on senna pods and cascara sagrada for the essential weekly purge for their families. Both of these are abortificients. Their visceral assault after ingestion, amplifies the contractions of the large intestinal wall, a situation which all too easily transfers to the uterus, inducing many an inadvertent miscarriage at all stages of a pregnancy. In the late C 17, however, abortificients were used specifically Y Knowledge of them was retained in the received wisdom of folk-medicine. Meadow and hedgerow plants including rue, juniper, barberry, sage, wormwood, tansy and greater celandine, each containing anthraquinone laxatives as constituents, were freely available to any who wished to pick and process them, and were administered solely to terminate pregnancies. Warnings in old herbals were discrete enough to distinguish which abortificient plants, then called emmenogues, might harm the foetus, and Downloaded from nah.sagepub.com at MCMASTER UNIV LIBRARY on March 17, 2015
226
which could be used solely to instigate labour. So, techniques of abortion in the C17 were not random-they were explicit and targetted; whereas, in the C19, apart from minimal mechanical interventions, they were universally inflicted through an unknown dietary imposition on a credulous population. Almonds and hazel nuts, another rich source of vitamin E were also part of the C 17 staple diet, albeit seasonally, but only presented on the Victorian table as part of the Christmas fare; could it be that this temporary lifting of the vitamin E level may have reflected a mini-surge in the statistics for late C19 birth rates? Perhaps some enterprising demographer will investigate this possibility. Altogether, I consider that diet, although not solely responsible, forms an important and often overlooked element of this story. It was not until the first decade of the C20 with improved health standards and enforced hygiene regulations, and when the Secondary Education Act of 1902 introduced an optimistic expectation of children's ability to progress into white-collar jobs, that Mr and Mrs Average Parent were provided with an incentive, and actively and knowingly sought to limit the size of their families.
REFERENCES 1. Labour Statistics. Returns of Wages, 1830-90. Board of Trade, H.M.S.O. 1887. 2. Allbutt, H.A. MRCP. E. LSA. The Wife's Handbook, R.H. Forder. London. 3. Reports of the Registrar-General. (34th: 1871; 44th: 1881) Birth Statistics. (Historical Series: FM1, no:l3). H.M.S.O. 4. Laslett, Peter, et al. English Historical Demography. Weidenfeld 1966. 5. Wrigley, E.A. Population and History. World University Library. 1969. 6. Neale, R.S. Class in English History. Blackwell 1981. 7. Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost. Methuen. 1965. 8. Burnett, John. Plenty and Want. Nelson 1966. 9. Ibid. p. 105. 10. Johnston, J. A Hundred Years Eating. McGill and Macmillan 1977. 11. Davies Stephen & Stewart A. Nutritional Medicine. Pan Books. 1987. 12. Mills, S. Dictionary of Modern Herbalism. Thorson. 1985.
*Deirdre Verrinder 2 Haarlem Road, Brook Green London W 14 OJL
*Mrs Verrinder is a genealogist and family historian.
Downloaded from nah.sagepub.com at MCMASTER UNIV LIBRARY on March 17, 2015
