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FIGURE 1—— Life expectancies at birth in major British provincial cities, 1801 to 1901, compared with the national aggregate trend.
Source. Derived from Szreter and Mooney.39
Note. Britain’s industrial cities were significantly less healthy than the national average at the beginning of the 19th century. Thereafter, they were plunged into an abyss of high mortality during the 1830s and 1840s, which prompted much social comment and a Royal Commission on the Health of Towns during the 1840s. There was some recovery in the 1850s, but no real improvements above the level of the 1820s until the 1870s and the era of "the civic gospel" and municipal "gas and water socialism."
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