Calculation of the distant future earning capacity of children may be ruled out as a force regulating marital sex, though calculation of the benefit of having some child alive when the parents reached old age may have been a good reason for wishing to have some children, but not an indefinite number. It is sometimes supposed that compulsory elementary education was itself a decisive factor in bringing home the advantages of family limitation to the working classes, on the grounds that it increased the costs of upbringing per child, even after schooling was made free from 1891. This change, however, came too late to explain the early limiters who had begun reducing their families from at least the 1860s; and in any event the opportunity costs of having children at school until they were ten years old were exceedingly small, seeing that there were so few jobs for that age group. Moreover, the majority of working-class parents did not need the state to persuade or compel them into sending their children to school, but voluntarily found the weekly schoolpence to send their children to the voluntary schools of the pre-1870 era. By the end of the 1850s there were already places in elementary schools of some sort, some of them admittedly of more than doubtful standards, for at least two thirds of the total school age group of seven- to twelve-year-olds, and although attendance was erratic and in many cases barely more than token, something like one third of the age group seems to have been at school for 150 days a year or more. These proportions had been increasing since the early nineteenth century, and increasing rapidly since the state first began giving some financial aid to the voluntary societies in 1833, while factory children working in the textile mills covered by the 1833 Factory Act were obliged to attend schools provided by their employers.
It may well be, therefore, that the very substantial minority of working-class parents who were sending their children to schools well before there was any compulsion helped to create the pool of pioneers in family limitation. After all, the mentality which led parents to feel that schooling would in some way benefit their children would also be likely to lead them to feel that they could not afford to provide schooling for an indefinite number of offspring. The burden of the direct costs may not seem very heavy, a typical threepence a week for schoolpence in the early Victorian years representing an outlay of around ten shillings a year per child at school. A family with four children simultaneously of school age – which could have been normal even when completed family size reached eight or more – would have had a peak outlay of £4 a year on school fees. That would have been a very considerable, and indeed unthinkable, sum for the lower paid workers whose annual incomes, if there was only one wage-earner in the family, scarcely totalled £25; but for the higher paid with earnings of £50 a year or more it looks at first sight like a possibly supportable expense. There were, however, indirect costs: the presentable and respectable shoes and clothes which the moral pressure of neighbourhood opinion made necessary for schoolchildren, for example; and, particularly before the 1850s when child labour was more widespread, the opportunity costs of forgone child earnings. All in all, the impact of schooling on the family budgets of even the highest paid workers was sufficiently large to make some family planning of birth intervals, in order not to have too many children at once of school age, a minimum prescription of prudential behaviour. Planning for a restrained ultimate family size was only a step away from this.
Children tend to grow up and become parents in their turn. It is entirely possible that the distinction between those who had had some schooling and those who had had none, which was a very marked distinction until the 1870s and 1880s, carried over into adult life. If it did not, it is hard to see what the purpose of education was. One relevant distinction was that the educated tended to get better jobs, or at least different ones, compared to the uneducated. Some, noted earlier, became commercial clerks; and some, usually the brightest pupils of the voluntary schools, became schoolteachers, mistresses as well as masters. Both of these groups were limiting their families from the 1860s, sharply so by the 1870s. Occupational mobility within the working classes, rather than upward social mobility into the lower middle class, was, however, probably the most common experience for the educated working-class children, a move into the more skilled and less heavily manual jobs to join those whose parents were already in them. Broadly, these also were occupations showing early signs of family limitation. Whether the connection lay in the nature and circumstances of the job, or in the general parcel of values and mentalities derived from the schooling, it is impossible to tell; probably both strands of influence combined to produce the desire for smaller families.
It is also impossible to tell what weight should be given to first-generation educational influences, acting on cost-conscious parents, and what weight to second-generation influences, acting on parents who had themselves been through school. Information on both the precise chronology of family limitation and of school-going habits is insufficiently exact to sort these out, and there is no reason why both stages should not have been at work. In broad terms, however, the educational cap fits. The latecomers to family limitation among the working classes were precisely the latecomers to schooling, the dockers, builders’ labourers, and agricultural labourers who needed the spur of compulsion before their children went to school, and whose families only began to shrink significantly in the 1880s. The miners, as always, remain an exception, since they had not neglected their children’s education but still continued to have a lot of offspring.
In the schoolroom, as with the piano or the trip to Blackpool, there is a mirror image of a sort of middle-class habits and pastimes and middle-class sexual-reproductive responses. But there is very little to suggest that the formative working-class experience was in some way communicated by or copied from the middle classes, or that the working-class response was a matter of adopting habits or attitudes disseminated by the middle classes. That there were some influences working like a yeast in society at large, which emanated from the middle classes, is not to be denied; and these undoubtedly included general exhortations to prudence – although nothing so vulgar and unseemly as specific birth-control advice – which were relevant to the adoption of family limitation within the working classes. The weight of the evidence and its interpretation, however, leads to the conclusion that the middle classes and the working classes each took their separate paths, for their own separate reasons, which led, with different timing, towards the small families of the twentieth century. Broadly similar responses to broadly comparable circumstances, occurring at different times and places, were more in the nature of womankind and mankind than in the fabric of the class structure. In this fundamental matter of the family the classes worked out their own destinies and their own controls, from a common pool of techniques, and any appearance of a percolation downwards from the top of society to the bottom was a mirage of chronology rather than a fact of emulation.
Many early Victorians supposed that they were witnessing a ‘crisis of the family’ that threatened, unless successfully