APPENDIX I

MARRIAGE-AGES OF VARIOUS SECTIONS OF THE POPULATION

IN ENGLAND

THE following is an extract (by permission of the Author and of the Royal Statistical Society) from a paper on Marriage-Rates and Marriage-Ages by Dr. William Ogle, M.A., F.R.C.P., etc., read before the Royal Statistical Society of London, March 1890, and printed in the Society's Journal, June 1890.

But if the average age at marriage varies but little from year to year, it is not so with the marriage-ages in different classes, as is very clearly to be seen in the two following tables (Tables F and G), in the former of which are given the mean ages at marriage of bachelors and spinsters in different occupational groups, while the other gives the age-distribution of bachelors and spinsters in the several groups at the time of marriage.

1 The age-distribution of the men employed in the different occupations differs much; and this would, if uncorrected, of course cause some difference in the mean

TABLE G.-Age-Distribution per 1000, of Bachelors in different Occupations, and of their Wives, at time of Marriage.

Men. Women. Men. Women. Men. Women. Men. Women. Men. Woinen.

These tables are based upon samples taken by me from the marriage registers of 1884-85. The samples were of considerable size; still it is quite possible that had they been larger, and had they extended over a greater number of years, the figures might have been somewhat different, though it is scarcely possible that they would have been materially altered. They show, at any rate, with sufficient clearness, that the ordinary belief that the lower the station in life, the earlier the age at which marriage is contracted, is true, and that the difference in this respect between the upper and the lower classes is very great indeed. It will be enough if marriage-ages of the groups. To meet this difficulty, so far as possible, in the professional and independent group were included students of law, medicine, theology, etc., as also all men described simply as gentlemen; so also with shopkeepers were included shopmen, and with farmers their sons or other near relatives living with them.

we take a single example, and compare miners, for instance, with the professional class. Of the miners who marry, 704 in 1000 are under 25 years of age; of the professional and independent class only 151; while the miners' wives, 827, and of the upper classes only 529, per 1000 are under that age. The average marriage age of the miners is 24, and of their wives 22 years; while the ages for the professional and independent class are respectively 31 and 26 years; a difference of seven years for the husbands and four years for the wives.

The table of mean ages has already appeared in the fortyninth Annual Report of the Registrar-General, and has been often quoted since; but, whenever I have chanced to see it cited, I have been somewhat surprised to find that the ages for the men were alone given, and no notice taken of the respective ages of the wives. It appears, however, to me that the ages of the men at marriage are, so far as concerns the growth of population, of comparatively small importance. For there is no reason whatsoever, so far as I am aware, to suppose that retardation of marriage in the case of men, of course within reasonable limits, will materially affect the number of their offspring, excepting that the older a man is when he marries the older will also be probably his wife, and further, that the older he and she are at marriage, the greater somewhat will be the chance that either he or she will die before the child-bearing period is fully completed. But independently of these considerations, there is, as I say, no reason to believe that a man who marries at 30 will have a smaller family than a man who marries at 20, so long as the two wives are of one and the same age. Doubtlessly in the long-run the wives in the two cases will not be of one and the same age, for as Table H shows, though older men usually marry older wives, they do not marry wives older in proportion to their own greater age. So far then as increase in population goes, the matter of importance is the age of the wife, not of the husband; and any material diminution in the growth of the people that is to be looked for from retarded marriage, must be obtained by retarding the marriages of women, not those of men. If greater age on the part of the husband were to have this effect, the ancient writers whom I have already quoted, who desired above all things the rapid growth of the population, would have been in serious error in proposing that the age of the husband should be 30 or 37 years; but as a matter of

observation they were well aware that the age of the man had but little to do with the number of the progeny, while the age of the wife was of considerable importance, and this, as we have seen, was put by them at 18 or 19.

As regards men, it is not the age at which they marry that is of importance, but the question whether they marry at all, and I have consequently tried to make some estimate of the relative proportions in which men in different classes of life altogether abstain from matrimony. The method I employed was to go through a large number of the census enumeration books, and ascertain what proportions of labourers and artisans, of shopkeepers, and of professional and independent men, in 1881, were still bachelors when they had reached the mature age of 50 years. I expected to find that the proportion would be smallest among the artisans and labourers, and highest in the professional and independent class; but, as a matter of fact, it turned out that it was among the shopkeepers that the proportion of confirmed bachelors was far the lowest, as probably, with more thought given to the subject, might have been anticipated, seeing that to a shopkeeper a wife is often almost a business necessity. Next to the shopkeepers, but a good way from them, came the artisans and labourers; while far ahead of all were the professional and independent class, with a proportion of permanent bachelors far above the rest. What is true of the men in these several groups is probably also true of the women, but I have no statistical evidence of this. I find, however, testimony to that effect given by those who are conversant with the habits of working women. Thus Miss Collett, writing of the east end of London, says, "Every girl in the lowest classes can get married, and with hardly any exceptions every girl does marry. This is not true of the middle classes." It thus appears that in the upper classes not only do a larger proportion of persons remain throughout life unmarried, but those who do marry, marry at a much more advanced age than is the case with the rest of the population.

1 Labour and Life of the People, p. 472.