Life today for many of us is more sheltered, more surrounded by material goods and more connected to the outside world than ever before. It's also nearly twice as long as it was in Victorian times.
According to stats from the Office for National Statistics life expectancy in 1841 was around 40 years. By 2010 it had risen to around eighty:
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| Source: ONS Mortality in England and Wales: Average Life Span, 2010 |
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| Source: ONS Mortality in England and Wales: Average Life Span, 2010 |
And depending on how you measure how long we live, we might expect to live as long as 85 (males) or 89 (females) as a modal average, as the ONS report explains:
"In 2010 life expectancy for a newborn baby boy was 79 years and for a newborn baby girl 83 years. These are the average number of years a baby could expect to live if he or she experienced the mortality rates at each age in 2010 throughout his or her life. An alternative measure of average life span is the age at which half of all deaths occurred before and the other half after (median age at death); in 2010 this was 82 for a man and 85 for a woman, up to three extra years of life than given by life expectancy at birth. The third measure of average life span, the modal age at death, gives a further three or four years of life: 85 and 89 years for a man and woman." - ONS
The difference between the modal average and the other two measures is that the others are skewed by the incredibly high infant mortality rates in the Victorian era which reduce the statistical lifespan of the average UK citizen.
Back in the Victorian era the peak age at people died was around 60-70, whereas by 2010 it was around 85:
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| Source: ONS Mortality in England and Wales: Average Life Span, 2010 |
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| Source: ONS Mortality in England and Wales: Average Life Span, 2010 |
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