Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth‐century British Cities

T he modern standard of living debate has been conducted throughout the last 40 years predominantly in the absence of any direct, detailed, and empirically based consideration of the mortality experience of the British working population during the industrial revolution era. 2 This is somewhat surprising in that, when setting out the basis for a 'pessimistic' view in his seminal contribution to the debate of 1957, Hobsbawm gave pride of place to evidence bearing on mortality and health, which he envisaged as ideally including 'mortality rates . . .morbidity rates and anthropometric data'. 3The last category of evidence, in particular, has certainly been brought into the debate with great ingenuity and to great effect during the past 10 years, as will be considered below.But where the study of mortality in British towns and cities is concerned, Armstrong's valuable work on Carlisle has remained until very recently a lone contribution; and even now, with the addition of Huck's work, information is available on only a handful of small towns. 4 This is almost certainly because of the relative paucity and inaccessibility of reliable, relevant demographic evidence for this particular period, the 'dark age' of Britain's modern historical demography, 1780-1850.As a result, the only publication which has attempted to construct a general demographic measure of urban mortality trends for this period with which to inform the standard of living debate, has in fact deployed a primarily conjectural, rather than an empirically grounded model. 5 While the problem 1 The new evidence on life expectancies in British cities presented in this article employs a method of calculation devised during his doctoral work by Mooney, while the interpretation of the material presented here has been developed by Szreter.This article substantially revises an earlier treatment of the subject, which appeared as Working paper no.67 (1996) of the Demography Program of the Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University.Szreter wishes to thank demographers and historians at A.N.U. for their warm hospitality during a period