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SUMMARYThis article examines three propositions put by Leunig and Voth: that smallpox reduced stature irrespective of location, that stunting was most apparent among adolescents, and that these relationships were obscured in my earlier work by small sample size. It tests these claims by re‐examining the original data—including the neglected Wandsworth data set—and questioning the meaning of the chosen method of graphical representation. Furthermore, and most fundamentally, the relationship between smallpox and stunting is advanced by adding new data on a further 34,310 prisoners. Using considerably larger data sets with many more juveniles, and refined definitions of rural and urban locations, this article confirms that the 'smallpox effect' varied by location, age, gender, and time period. That the relationship between smallpox and stunting was mediated through place and time suggests the role played by evolving urban conditions. The article offers a warning on the dangers of aggregating data without paying heed to important composition effects, and it argues that size does matter: the size of the smallpox effect, population size, sample size, and the size of the p‐statistic. The reply concludes by again questioning the likely causes of stunting in the world's first great metropolis, London, arguing for the importance of examining chronic illness as a source of ongoing nutritional insult.

Prefamine Irish living standards have proved enigmatic. They are intriguing because they hold the key to understanding the trajectory of economic development in the first half of the nineteenth century. They have remained elusive because of the paucity of available information. Using Australian data, this paper examines regional trends in Irish-born female convict heights, identifying divergent tendencies between west and east that left Ulster women the tallest in the land.

Recent works have investigated whether smallpox stunted growth. The answer is important for disentangling the factors driving changing heights. This article outlines the disease and its history in Britain. It then introduces a new source for the study of smallpox: prisoner records. These offer rich descriptions of individuals, including a pockmarked complexion. While pockmarks were not clearly associated with stunting in Ireland or in most of England, the connection did exist in London. In the metropolis, smallpox acted as a proxy for the worst urban disamenities, being most prevalent in the poorest, most overcrowded parts of the city.

AbstractDoes adult stature capture conditions at birth or at some other stage in the growth cycle? Anthropometrics is lauded as a method for capturing net nutritional status over all the growing years. However, it is frequently assumed that conditions at birth were most influential. Was this true for historical populations? This article examines the heights of Flemish men born between 1800 and 1876 to tease apart which moments of growth were most sensitive to disruption and reflected in final heights. It exploits two proximate crises in 1846–9 and 1853–6 as shocks that permit age effects to be revealed. These are affirmed through a study of food prices and death rates. Both approaches suggest a shift of the critical moment away from the first few years of life and towards the adolescent growth spurt as the most influential on terminal stature. Furthermore, just as height is accumulated over the growing years, conditions influencing growth need to be understood cumulatively. Economic conditions at the time of birth were not explanatory, but their collective effects from ages 11 to 18 years were strongly influential. At these ages, both health and nutrition mattered, to varying degrees. Teenagers, rather than toddlers, should be our guides to the past.

Using parish-level information from Sir F.M. Eden's The state of the poor (1797) we can identify typical diets for the counties of England. These diets varied considerably and afforded very different standards of nutrition. We compute a nutritional score for this diet, paying attention to the presence of vitamins, minerals and micronutrients shown to be essential for health and growth in constructing this measure. Other information in the reports allows us to relate county-level nutrition to factors in the local economy. In particular we find nutrition was positively related to the availability of common land in the area and to women's remunerated work if conducted from home. Lack of common land and little local supply of dairy products also pushed households into buying white wheaten bread rather than baking their own wholemeal loaf. Replicating some of this analysis with household-level data confirms these results. Diet also maps onto stature: male convicts to Australia were significantly taller if they originated in a county with a more nutritious diet. This verifies the important impact of nutrition on stature and demonstrates the sensitivity of height as a measure of key aspects of welfare.

The impact of changing diet and resultant nutrition on living standards over the industrial revolution has been much debated, yet existing data have enabled only general trends to be identified. We use data from Eden's survey of parishes in 1795 and the Rural Queries of 1834 to go beyond average calorie intake, instead focusing on micronutrients and quality of diet. From this we discern regional differences in diet. In 1795 these differences were related to the availability of common land and the nature of women's work. Diet in both periods also maps onto stature. Using five datasets on height, we observe a positive impact of diet in 1795 on men's, women's, and boy's heights. By 1834 the impact is less evident; for men it remained, for women and boys it either no longer existed or became negative. This may indicate the superseding of nutritional factors by environmental ones, but it also hints at the emergence of a different relationship between height and nutrition for women and children compared with men. We speculate that this points to a shift in the intra‐household allocation of resources, but challenge the notion that the emergence of male breadwinning automatically led to universal female disadvantage.