The parish of Porto Salvo Valletta : a social history, 1870-1890

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to uncover some aspects of the everyday life of the people of Valletta during the late nineteenth century. It starts with an investigation on the censuses of that time, in order to understand the social structure of the population and people's occupation. The main questions being asked regarding the structure of the population are: Was there a migration into the inner City or were the people starting to migrate into newly built suburbs around the harbour from the City? Then we turn to an examination of the result of the demographic process, starting with the density population of Valletta at that time, and the effects this left on the housing conditions at that time. Given the fact that in the City resided well-off families as well as a large poor and working class community, we will direct some attention to the particular areas they were settled in and what were their commodities. At this point in this topic some other interesting questions emerge: What were the different cultural aspects of the people of Valletta and the people coming from the country districts? Were there any culture and social aspects which came to characterize the Valletta population from the rest of the Maltese population? As the census of 1891 is the most organized and well structured among the three censuses which are used in this work, the census divides all the people into six groups: the professional, domestic, commercial, agricultural, industrial and 'unproductive', thus the dissertation gives a clear description of the people's occupations in the Capital and the new occupations that were introduced in the course of the two decades under review such as the Electrician and the Master Mariner and which came to be associated with the Valletta population. Moreover this work shows that other jobs were losing their popularity such as seamstresses and the pedlars the former due to the importation of sewing machines and the latter due to the importation of cheaper goods.