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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
‘The number of marriages in a nation perhaps fluctuates independently of external causes, but it is a fair deduction from the facts, that the Marriage Returns in England point out periods of prosperity little less distinctly than the funds measure the hopes and fears of the money market. If the one is the barometer of credit, the other is the barometer of prosperity, present in part, but future, expected, anticipated, in still greater part.’ This view was expressed by George Graham, the Registrar-General, in his 8th Annual Report for 1845, published in 1848. He argued that the fluctuatiòns in the marriages of a country expressed the views which the great body of the people took of their prospects in the world and noted that the fluctuation could be clearly seen in the towns even when the variations of the annual marriage totals were not considerable in the kingdom as a whole. D. V. Glass, in his study of marriage frequency and economic fluctuations also found that ‘the whole period, 1856 to 1932, showed a close connection between marriage and prosperity’.
1. 8th Annual Report of the Registrar-General (PP. 1847–8 [996], XXV, 1), pp. ix, xvii, xxiii.Google Scholar
2. Glass, D. V., ‘Marriage Frequency and Economic Fluctuations in England and Wales, 1851–1934’, in Hogben, L. (ed.), Political Arithmetic (1938), 281.Google Scholar
3. Full printed reports for the years 1848–54 were also issued by the Registrar-General but were not included in Parliamentary Papers.
4. Foster, John, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (1974).Google Scholar
5. Dennis, Richard J., ‘Community and Interaction in a Victorian City: Huddersfield, 1850–1880’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1975).Google Scholar
6. Anderson, Olive, ‘The Incidence of Civil Marriage in Victorian England and Wales’, Past and Present, lvix (11 1975), 50–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7. Pollard, Sidney, A History of Labour in Sheffield (1959), 92, 111.Google Scholar
8. Ibid., 126.
9. I owe this information to Mr Clifford O'Neill of the University of Lancaster.
