The following two articles are from the 19th Century and are contemporary views of the registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths. The first is part of a diatribe austerely entitled "THE MARRIAGE AND REGISTRATION BILLS" and is from the famous monthly, BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE printed and sold in Edinburgh. The article, published in May 1836, was written from a conservative point of view, and foretells the crumbling of The Establishment, poverty stricken clergy and revolution on the streets. (It must be remembered that the French Revolution was still a living memory - France's Reign of Terror began in 1793). It finds little good in the Act and is suspicious of the reasons behind it.
The second is taken from the weekly magazine, appropriately called ONCE A WEEK and is entitled "FAMILY SECRETS (As told by the Registrar-General)". Dated May 23rd 1868, thirty years after the original Bill it takes a different view entirely. It must presumably have stemmed from a report by the Registrar-General, which used the statistics obtained in those thirty years to come to some appropriate predictions, the most sobering of which was that over one quarter of the children born in 1868 would be dead by 1871….
| 1) | THE MARRIAGE AND REGISTRATION BILLS |
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May 1836:
The bill for registering Births, Deaths, and Marriages in England, is ……
……..The direct result of this bill would be, in the first place, to establish an inquisitorial power of compelling persons to give notice, and of entering houses, even to the sick chamber of mothers, or the apartments of the dying and dead. No house is to be closed against the officers of police at any time, or under any circumstances.The officer is to be entitled to make the most minute and offensive enquiries if he will, he may ask particulars respecting the father and mother, which it may be painful to their feelings, or even injurious to their interests to disclose, relative to their marriage.
The demand that every birth shall be registered within fifteen days, will have the results, either that the child, whilst still too tender to be exposed to the open air, must be sent to the church to be baptized (the usual time at present being a month or more, according to the strength of the infant and the season of the year), or must be baptized at home, which is contrary to the practice of the church, and to the spirit of a rite eminently religious; besides, in the larger parishes, compelling the clergyman to be constantly employed traversing his parish in this occupation along; or if the baptism be deferred, as it generally will be, the child must have a name for the Registry; which, being before baptism, will not be his christian name. If even at present, parents exhibit great indolence in bringing children to the font (frequently being urged to it only by the earnest request of the clergyman, and the necessity of a baptismal certificate for getting their children into public schools), how much more likely is this indolence to prevail where a name has been already registered? But unless the christening has taken place, the child cannot be regarded as a Christian. If the baptismal name should be different from the registered, there must be great confusion in consequence when the measure is brought to act on the scale of a country of twelve millions of people. Those who are acquainted with the action of large country parishes know the difficulty of preventing the most singular negligence in matters of baptism. The probable effect of registry before baptism would be to increase that negligence until it became a custom to forget the necessity of a rite, for which a substitute, however imperfect, had been provided by the law.
The declared object of this bill has been to relieve the Dissenters. The Dissenters already have registers that answer every legal purpose. The actual consequences of this bill and its coadjutor will be to tempt away the people from the church, by giving a loose to every caprice to extinguish all the constitutional rights and uses of the establishment, and to putting on a level with a learned, loyal, numerous, and regulated body of scholars and divines, the whole miscellaneous multitudes who with a hundred angry varieties of opinion, and with no public bond to the state, which outnumbers them, even in population, six to one. The bills are wholly corrupt. They admit of no modification; their principle is mischievous; they must be thrown out altogether. The grievances of the Dissenters are imaginary; but if they were real, and the question was whether they are to be left a they are, or the Established Church, the pillar of the morals, the liberties, and the religion of the empire, to be broken down before them, what man of honesty or virtue, of constitutional feeling or religious knowledge, would not say, let the Church of England stand?
In this summation of the proposed measures, we have left aside the circumstances, and they are very important ones – that the bills will require a large number of clerks and officers in additional to the poor law officials – a machinery which, in the first instance, and not yet extending beyond England, is estimated by its proposers at not less than from L.80,000 to L.100,000 a year – (sixteen clauses of the forty-six of the registry bill being occupied in the construction of this machinery alone) – and that, in the next place, it will deprive the whole clergy of a portion of their income, and the clergy of cities and large towns – in many instances, of a very large portion, if not the entire, calculated at L.50,000 a year, a sum now paid without difficulty, but for which, unless those clergyman are to perish in the streets, public compensation must be provided. The bills, even in this point of view, having the fortune to combine the three evils against which the most vehement declamation is raised at the present day – Government patronage, national waste, and personal spoliation. Whatever may be the motives of the inventors, those bills are the worst sign that has yet been given of the progress of public danger. Their spirit menaces the worst and most hopeless kind of revolutions, a revolution in the morals of the empire, one which alike precipitates all other overthrow, and leaves national recovery, like the recovery from the grave, beyond all power, but miracle.
[A dissenter is described as: There are tribes of Dissenters as remote from each other as the eagle from the oyster.We have the Dissenter who fits up a gilded cradle for Johanna Southcote’s offspring. The Dissenter who believes that Irving was Elias, and that the gibberish which he taught a dozen foolish women, and more foolish men, to chatter at six in the morning, in West’s painting room, was direct inspiration.The Dissenter who believes with Drummond that the millennium is to come precisely on midsummer-day next, by St Paul’s clock. The Dissenter who believes the world to be the work of Lucifer in person, and laughs at the millennium. The Dissenter who distributes the whole Bible; the Dissenter who cuts out St Paul, and denies his authority.The Dissenter who is content with one wife, and the Dissenter who claims the advantages of a plurality.The Dissenter who clothes himself in the sanctity of a capeless coat and brown beaver; and the Dissenter who regards his natural liberty as being insulted by the policeman’s compelling him to walk the streets in coat and breeches. Every rambling folly of the human mind, every arrogant defiance of authority, every knavery of the vilest faction, may range itself under this banner.]
| 2) | FAMILY SECRETS |
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| (AS TOLD BY THE REGISTRAR-GENERAL) |
May 1868:
The Registrar-General is in possession of a greater number of family secrets than any other person in the kingdom. His tabulated records of Births, Marriages, and Deaths, continued year by year and relating to every corner of England and Wales, have enabled him to draw conclusions and frame generalizations with confidence which, to many persons, seems nothing less than presumption; and yet, the more these conclusions and generalizations are studied, the more reliable are they found to be, when interpreted with the proper conditions and limitations.
Let us attend to a few of the matters which this important functionary has to tell us - about the age that we shall probably marry, the chance that we have of being married at all, the probabilities of widowers and widows interfering with the matrimonial market of bachelors and spinsters, the number of years during which husbands and wives will live together in wedded bliss, the probable number of their children, the proportion of those children who will grow up to be men and women. The chance those children will have of being in their turn married, the probable ages at which parents and children alike will be removed from the land of the living - events which seem, to casual observers, equally beyond the range of ordinary calculation and reasonable estimate.
And first, let us suppose that a thousand infants, comprising the usual proportion of boy-babies and girl-babies, come into the world in this present year, 1868; by what year will just half of them be swept away, or the total reduced to five hundred? Considering the multiplicity of causes of disease and of accidents, the different degrees in which poverty affects different classes of the community, and varied influence of hereditary malady upon individuals - considering these things, it seems quite impossible to answer such a question. And yet it can be answered, with a degree of approximation almost inexplicable to those who are new to these kinds of inquiry. The Registrar-General would assert pretty confidently that, in about forty-three or forty-four years from the present time, that is by about year 1911 or 1912, the thousand will be reduced to five hundred; there will have been five hundred deaths and burials, and the survivors will be men and women about forty-three years of age. How does he know this? Simply by inferring the future from the past. After tabulating and examining millions of instances, he finds certain ratios maintained, year after year, with singular uniformity. England may become more wealthy, after a long period; but the change from year to year in small. The Registrar-General does not know that his anticipations will be borne out; but the probability is so irresistibly strong as to establish the fundamental theories and vast operations of life insurance, to the undoubted benefit of the community generally.
Then, about the boys and girls, the relative numbers in which they will give employment to the cot-makers in the first instance and the coffin-makers afterwards. Physicians and physiologists do not know why it is so; but every years experience in England shows that more boys are born than girls. There seems to have been no exception to this rule as long as we have paid attention to census matters. And yet (an apparent contradiction) there are always more females than males living in England. How is the balance overturned, and the preponderance changed from one side to the other? The answer is, that boys are struck down by death more rapidly than girls. It is for the medical men to assign causes for this; the fact itself is undisputed. It almost seems like presumption, but it really is not so when regarded simply as an inference from the past, that of every thousand English children born (say) in 1868, about a hundred boys will be carried off within twelve months after birth, whereas the deaths of girls will only range between seventy and eighty.
As the population advances from infancy to the active school age of boys and girls, there is the same power of predicting the probable changes that will take place. Of the thousand little ones, for instance, spoken of in the previous paragraph, adding those who die during the second year to those who die during the first, there will be just about one quarter of the whole number carried off. Two hundred and fifty little coffins, or thereabouts, will be wanted for those who are cut down before they can be two-year olds. The real history of infant mortality, and of domestic sorrow consequent upon it, cannot be known without some aid from those dry matters of statistics, as many persons regard them.
Once get over the troubles of childhood, however, and there comes a period of active animal life when the fell destroyer is set a good deal of defiance. If we ask which is the most healthy time of our lives, the period of existence when the death-rate is the lowest, the Registrar-General tells us that it is between the ages of ten and fifteen - the genuine school period. Out of a thousand boys and girls, distributed in the actual existing ratios between the limits of age, there is, it appears, a likelihood of mourning for only about five during the next twelve months, on an average of all conditions of life. The number would be greater at more advanced and at less advanced ages.
Nothing is more curious, in the Registrar-General's tables and inferences, than the experience in regard to marriages and non-marriage, bachelors and spinsters, husbands and wives, widowers and widows, and the chances as to how many of us will ever be married at all. This prosaic functionary can tell us more on the subject than any Zadkiel or Raphael, any fortune-tellers or astrologers, any novel writers, either sensational or sentimental.
Suppose there be a hundred weddings in a given time, in all respects of an average kind as to the ages and conditions of the two hundred persons married, and in the part of England where they reside - who can tell how many of those persons will be widowers and widows, and how many will be under age, at the time of marriage? The Registrar-General is the man. He will state that, about twenty-two of them will have been married before, and that about eighteen will be minors - the remaining one hundred and sixty (a few more or less) being bachelors and spinsters of full age. Suppose, again, we look at those eighteen minors, and separate them into youths and maidens; is there an equal number of both? By no means. Our great authority tells us that the maidens marry at earlier ages than the youths; the minor-brides are more than double the number of minor-bridegrooms. Taking another mode of stating it - of a thousand Englishwomen who marry next year, about a hundred and thirty will be under age; whereas among an equal number of men who enter into wedlock, only about fifty will venture into the important step under age - account for it how we please, by poverty, or caution, or love of liberty, or any other ground. Hence the recent flood of fatherly or motherly complaints, in the newspapers and magazines, about the difficulty of getting husbands for the girls; daughters are ready to marry earlier than an equal number of young men are ready to marry them. The number of spinsters waiting to be wedded is indeed a noteworthy feature in modern English society. When a young girl reaches fifteen years of age she begins to be ranked among the marriageable maidens, whether prudently or not; when a single woman reaches fort-five, she nearly goes off the marriage list altogether. Now the Registrar-General, judging from his millions of instances, tells us that, of all the women and girls, of all ages and conditions, now living in England, about one fourth, or a little under, comprises married women between the same limits of age. There are, then, five spinsters, between fifteen and forty-five years old, out of every twenty girls and women of all ages, waiting for husbands - if we a may use so ungallant a phrase. How the California gold-diggers would welcome this state of things, looking out as they do for wives, and finding them so difficult to obtain!
The makers of wedding rings and bride cakes are, of course, very materially interested in the number of marriages which each year will bring forth. Now it appears that our infallible guide has no more doubt on this matter than on those which have already engaged our attention. We may, it seems, pretty safely rely on this - that for every thousand people amongst us, of both sexes and all ages and conditions, there will within the next twelve months be about eight marriages. When times are prosperous, people marry more readily than when work is slack, money scanty, food dear, and sickness prevalent; but the average preserves itself with surprising regularity. How far this will go towards absorbing the marriageable stock can only be approximately guessed. We are told that - in London, at any rate - of all the people, twenty years old and upwards, fourteen out of every twenty are husbands, wives, widowers, or widows, leaving six bachelors and spinsters; but this is not conclusive, because some of the youths and maidens under twenty, and some of the widowers and widows, may safely be placed on the marriageable list.
Here is something relating to the probable age of marrying that will, to many persons, seem a matter of absorbing interest. How old will you be when you marry? Our wonderful prognosticator tells us that, of every thousand children born, we may pretty safely make the assertion - that about five hundred and seventy will, after successfully fighting through all the troubles of babyhood and young-personhood, become husbands and wives; and moreover, that the average age of all persons on the day of their marriage is about twenty-five. Out of the thousand infants here supposed, what becomes of the remaining four hundred and thirty? Some of them do not live to a marriageable age; the rest will live to be adults but will remain unmarried - willingly or unwillingly as the case may be. Furthermore, in regard to wedlock, just about one half of the men who marry (leaving bachelors, old and young, unnoticed) do so by the time they are twenty-five; and another fourth of them do so by the age of thirty. Scotchmen are a little later, Irishmen a little earlier, in the average age of marrying; but of Englishmen, three out of four of those who marry at all do so before they are thirty. Of womankind the ratio is of course somewhat different, the average age of wedlock being less.
When old Weller cautioned Sam against widows, he spoke out of the unwelcome experience of his own domestic hearth. If he had consulted the Registrar-General, he would have found that widows do not really occupy the matrimonial market in any very inordinate degree. In a hundred weddings, we are told to expect that about thirteen widowers will lead some blooming bride or other to the alter, whereas the number of widows will only be nine; in other words, the spinsters hold their own against the widows more successfully than the bachelors against the widowers. On the other hand, youths and maidens do not have the billing and cooing, the marrying and giving in marriage so much to themselves as some of them are in the habit of supposing; these figures tell us that eleven out of every hundred, or thereabouts, of those who marry have been married before; they are widowers and widows who make a second venture in the wedding market.
How long will Darby and Joan live together? What is the average period during which the married couple will live on as man and wife, neither one having to mourn the loss of the other? This is one of the matters which the tables of the Registrar-General enable him to discuss with some approach to certainty. He says in substance, "Give me the ages at which they marry and I will tell you." It need hardly be said that there is a prospect of longer wedded life to those who marry moderately early than those who marry late, other things being equal. We are told that if a man at twenty-five marry a woman of the same age, they will probably jog on together for about twenty-seven years; they will be about fifty-two when the first of them drops off. Every other grouping of ages would present its own particular figures, if taken (as this is) from averages of many thousand instances.
Then there is another question - how many children will be born to Darby and Joan? If paterfamilias would reckon up the responsibilities which are spread out before him, he may be told that an average English married man has four or five children in all. It is difficult to deal with half a child, and say four and a-half; but in large numbers, the ratio comes out in this form, that a hundred married couples will have about four hundred and fifty children. If Butler has ten, Walker may have only two, and Simmonds none at all; but if an equalizing process were gone through, the average would be near about as here stated - not, be it remembered, the children living at any one time, but the whole progeny of the marriage.
And this leads us to consider the gap which now and then brings mourning into every family. After making all allowances for the variation in age at which death occurs, from the newborn to the centenarian, there are certain averages which may be struck, and which remain wonderfully constant year after year, when no special epidemic or special inclemency of season is recorded. We have already noticed the guessings of the Registrar-General as to the number of years which will elapse before just one half of any assignable number of new-born infants will die; the degree of rapidity of which the boy-babies will be carried of compared to the girl-babies; the number of both sexes that will die in the first year and the second; and the probable death-rate during what may be called the school-age. In furtherance of the same systematic examination, it is interesting to notice in what manner births conquer deaths, leading to a gradual increase of population in all except very special states of society. In a general way the ratio never differs far from three to two - half as many births again as deaths. Years of plenty and health tell one way, years of scarcity and epidemics tell another; but, as a sort of average, to every thousand persons now living in England, of all ages and conditions, the nation may pretty fairly expect to rejoice over thirty-three births, or thereabouts, and to mourn over twenty-two deaths, within the next twelve months; after striking a balance, there will be ten or twelve more of us per thousand than there are now. These may or may not seem very large numbers to the reader, depending on the breadth of his imagination; but the population of twenty millions, which England and Wales have now reached, the totals become formidable - more than four hundred thousand mournings, funerals, occasions for family sorrow next year; more than six hundred thousand little strangers to be welcomed, be it with hearty sincerity or not. If tears of sorrow and tears of joy are ever to be counted, the Registrar-General could furnish us with some of the data, at any rate, for the counting.
A very strange estimate - strange to those who are new to the subject - is the following. What is the quantity of life which we are at all justified in expecting on an average, or what is the expectation of life, as insurance officers would call it? Among all of us - male and female, young and old, rich and poor, noble and ignoble, healthy and unhealthy, provident and improvident, temperate and intemperate, abstemious and gluttonous, wise and foolish, just in the proportions in which we make up the totality of the society in England - how many more years shall we live, share and share alike? Strange it may appear and bold to attempt an answer, but not at all rash and unreasonable if all the conditions be held steadily in view. "About thirty years - a little more or less," - says the Registrar-General. If the share and share alike fate were in store for us, this functionary would kill us all by the end of the century; those who overlive that date will about balance those who fail to reach it. Children born into the world in the intervening space of time are of course left out of the computation.
All this lore is too valuable to be either pooh-poohed or incautiously used. Let us see exactly what it means. A dense city, like London or Liverpool, may present some of the averages of different value from a sparsely inhabited county like Westmoreland or Northumberland; but an aggregate of the whole kingdom will correct these inequities. One year may have a little more rain or cold, a little more scarcity and privation, a little more war or pestilence, than the year immediately preceding or following it; and these differences may have some influence on the number of births, marriages, and deaths; but such inequalities have a remarkable tendency to balance and neutralize each other, when vast aggregates of instances are taken into account.
Obviously the second article is more level headed than the first, but it is interesting to look back at contemporary opinions of, what is for Genealogists, a major source of research information. The worries of 1836 were thankfully unfounded (or could we postulate that the Bill was the first nudge of the first domino that was to reduce the Anglican Church to what it is today?), and the assumptions of 1868 gave a positive taste of the future for analysis of population statistics.