The Effects of Population Redistribution on the Level of Mortality in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales

R O B E R T W O O D S It appears from Wrigley and Schofield's estimates of life expectation at birth in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that no radical increase occurred. 1In 1851 life expectation was approximately 40 for both sexes in combination, about 36 or 37 in 1801, and the same in 1751.At best three or four years were added during the first half of the nineteenth century, but life chances were not substantially improved during the last half of the eighteenth century.By 1901 life expectation had reached about 48, and in 1911 it was in the low fifties and increasing rapidly as a direct result of the secular decline in infant mortality that began in the early 1900s. 2 The impression given by these figures is one of no change followed by slow change and accelerating advance.But to what extent is this an illusion, an artifact of the averaging together of very different regional and local mortality patterns?