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43
pital were married; and the non-parishioners delivered in this establishment, ought to
be excluded from the calculation. With this correction, there is one illegitimate to
every eight legitimate children born in South St. Giles. *
The social character of the population of the three sub-districts may be inferred
from what has gone before, about the bouse accommodation and the density of the
population. I have no means of knowing the precise number of Irish residents in the
several localities ; but it is certain that Bloomsbury has few, and that they congregate
almost entirely to the South of Holborn and Oxford Street.
There is no common Lodging House in Bloomsbury, with the exception of the
House for Single Men in George Street, which scarcely deserves to be included among
the others. Twenty-two of the police common lodging houses are in North St. Giles,
the rest, forty-seven in number, are in St. Giles, South.
There is a curious circumstance disclosed by the census tables which deserves
to be here enunciated. It is the rule in London, and almost in every district of London
that the female population is in a certain excess of the males; St. Giles, North, and
Bloomsbury observe this rule, indeed in the lattter the excess is unusually large, giving
19 females to 14 males. This preponderance of females is not the same at all ages, but
is essentially in the population between 20 and 40, and it results in a great measure
from the women servants in the houses of the sub-district. The rule of excess on the
side of the females, is however violated in the case of St. Giles' South, where there
were in 1851, 245 males more than females. At the census of 1841 however, the
excess was according to rule in favor of females.
How did the exceptional condition at the time of the particular census of 1851
come about ? Was the excess of men only due to some temporary cause, such as the
improvements in the streets of St. Giles, whereby the common lodging houses became
crowded with labourers whose services were in demand in the locality, and who thus
came to outweigh the population of the other sex? Perhaps such may be the reason,
as the common lodging houses, before the operation of the Act relating to them
(November 1851) had a great elasticity in their means of accomodating large numbers
of these labouring men. Still the excess of males suggests a connexion with the
excess of illegitimate births in this South St. Giles, and perhaps it is part of a larger
social problem of extreme interest and intricacy, which it would be foreign to my
province to discuss.
In examining the mortality of the different portions of St. Giles, it is of course
an essential correction to refer to the localities from which they are brought, all those
persons who were admitted into the Infirmary in a condition of disease and there died.
At present the Workhouse situated in South St. Giles, gives to this sub-district an
excess of deaths. Whenever it has been possible, the necessary correction has been
made, but even after this distribution there remains an excess of deaths among the
inmates of the Workhouse, which require that it shall be considered apart from the
locality in which it is situated.
For this reason, and because of an investigation into the localization of disease
These numbers are based on the returns of two years, 1851 and 1852, which do not
materially differ from each other.