This volume is an important study in demographic history. It draws on the indi-
vidual returns from the 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses of England and Wales, to
which Garrett, Reid, Schürer and Szreter were permitted access ahead of sched-
uled release dates. Using the responses of the inhabitants of 13 communities to
the special questions included in the 1911 'fertilityd' census, they consider the
interactions between the social, economic and physical environments in which
people lived and their family building experience and behaviour. Techniques
and approaches based in demography, history and geography enable the
authors to re-examine the declines in infant mortality and marital fertility which
occurred at the turn of the twentieth century. Comparisons are drawn within
and between white collar, agricultural and industrial communities and the
analyses, conducted at both local and national level, lead to conclusions which
challenge both contemporary and current orthodoxies.

EILIDH GARRETT was until recently a Senior Research Associate at the
Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. She has
published widely in the field of demographic history, with articles in journals
which include Continuity and Change, International Journal of Population
Geography, Population and Development Review, Historical Research and Social
History of Medicine and is now a Senior Research Fellow in the Geography
Department, University of Portsmouth.

ALICE REID is a Research Fellow both at St John's College, Cambridge and at
the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. She
has published extensively in the field of demographic history, with articles in
journals including International Journal of Population Geography and Historical
Research, and has contributed chapters to The Decline of Infant and Child Mortality:
The European Experience 1750–1900 (1997) and La Demographia y la Historia de la
Famiglia (1997).

KEVIN SCHÜRER is the Director of the UK Data Archive and Professor of
History at the University of Essex. Previously he was employed as a Senior
Research Associate at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and
Social Structure. He has published widely on aspects of the history of the family,
methodology and historical demography. His books include Surveying the People
(1992) and Local Communities in the Victorian Census Enumerators' Books (1996).

SIMON SZRETER is a Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge, a
Fellow at St John's College and currently an ESRC Research Fellow. He has pub-
lished widely on demographic history and the history of demography and on
many related aspects of modern British history. His major study, Fertility, Class
and Gender in Britain 1860–1940, was published by Cambridge University Press
in 1996.