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of each are not very distinctive. St. George district has the maximum of good houses,
and St. Giles, South, the largest number of poor, while St. Giles, North, is intermediate,
and contains every variety, from Bedford Square to Church Lane.
The density of the population of course follows the same order. St. George has
138 persons to the acre; St. Giles, South, 317; and St. Giles, North, 291; or correcting
these numbers for the inhabited acres of each sub-district, they become 171 for
Bloomsbury, and 376, and 311 for St. Giles, South and North, respectively, a very
remarkable amount of difference.
Again, Bloomsbury has but 8.4 persons to each house, while St. Giles,
South, has 14.3, and St. Giles, North, 13.4. This last district, however, includes
portions quite as crowded as any in St. Giles, South, for if only a third of its houses
be inhabited at the rate of those in Bloomsbury, it follows that the other two-thirds
will be crowded with 16 or 17 persons a-piece, and this is probably about the truth.
It has been before stated that there are fewer children" under five, in St. Giles
than in the rest of the town. The difference is most in St. George, Bloomsbury,
where there are scarcely more than three-quarters the number of such children as
would be found in an equal population elsewhere in London. In St. Giles, South, the
deficiency in children, under five, is least marked, but still there is a deficiency. St.
Giles, North, as usual, occupies the middle position.
The births exhibit the same peculiarity. While St. Giles, North, has the
same birth-rate as the metropolis, 33 or 34 to the thousand, St. Giles, South, is in
excess, 43 to 46 per thousand, (or excluding strangers in the Lying-in Hospital, 40
per thousand), and St. George has only 24 births to the same number of residents.
The small number of children, and the low birth-rate of Bloomsbury, are probably
explicable as the same facts are, in other localities occupied by the better
classes. Those who have earned for themselves the means of living in large houses,
are, as a rule, persons who have passed the middle period of life, and whose children
are growing up around them. These children, born when their parents were
younger, have been registered in some less prosperous neighbourhood, and now their
numbers do not increase so rapidly. The unmarried domestic servants of the upper
classes contribute also, both by their civil condition, and by their actual numbers, to keep
down the birth-rate and the population of children, in a wealthier district. Converse
considerations will assist to an explanation of the high birth-rate of St. Giles, South.
The class of the inhabitants of these three sub-districts is not unaptly illustrated
by the numbers of illegitimate births. While in London, one child in every twentyfour
is born out of wedlock, in St. Giles district there is one in every sixteen, or half
as many again.
Bloomsbury is highly commendable in this respect, only 1 child in every 50
being illegitimate. St. Giles, North, is also better than the rest of the town, its proportion
being 1 in 29. But St. Giles, South, tells a very different story: 80 or 90
children in the years examined, that is, every tenth child, were illegitimate; indeed the
proportion is even greater than this, for all the women confined in the Lying-in Hos-