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Never Trust the Census Taker, even when he's Dead

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Henry C. Binford
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Extract

In the statistical jungle of the twentieth century, the collection of vast amounts of demographic data is an activity as relentless as breathing. We seldom question our impulse to count ourselves, and to ensure that our births, marriages, deaths, and innumerable other events are duly and permanently recorded. For reasons of both practicality and curiosity, historians and demographers have long attempted to possess the same sorts of data for as much of the past as possible, and have devised ever more ingenious ways of obtaining them. Most recently, such efforts have involved systematic analysis of very large numbers of quantitative records, and have borne fruit in studies of family characteristics, population trends, migration, mobility, and the like. As a result, it is now reasonable to discuss age-specific fertility in seventeenth-century Colyton as well as in twentieth-century London. With understandable pride, the practitioners of the new historical demography have described their accomplishment as one of pushing back the boundary which divides our modern, numerical age from a “pre-statistical past”.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 2 , May 1975, pp. 22 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

Notes

1. The phrase is used by Henry, Louis and others. See Henry's preface to Wrigley, E. A. (ed.), An Introduction to English Historical Demography (1966), viii.Google Scholar

2. Among his most important contributions are: ‘Some Aspects of the Development of Demography’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, civ (1955–1956), 854–69Google Scholar; ‘John Graunt and his Natural and Political Observations’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, ser. B, vol. 159 (10 12 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Two Papers on Gregory King’, in Glass, D. V. and Eversley, D. E. C. (eds.), Population in History (1965), 159–220; Introduction to Malthus (1953).Google Scholar

3. This point has also been emphasized by Schumpeter, Joseph A., History of Economic Analysis (1954), 252–3.Google Scholar

4. See the excerpts from Rickman's letters to Southey in Williams, Orlo, Lamb's Friend the Census Taker: Life and Letters of John Rickman (1911), 30–4.Google Scholar

5. Cox, J.Charles, The Parish Registers of England (1910), 1–5Google Scholar; Burn, John Southerden, Registrum Ecclesiae Parochialis: The History of Parish Registers in England (2nd edn, 1862), 4–18Google Scholar; Mols, Roger, Introduction à la démographie historique des villes d'Europe du XIVe au XVIIIe Siècle, I, 76ff.Google Scholar; The Catholic Encyclopedia, XII, 721–2.

6. The literature on this connection is vast. For short discussions, see Glass's works on Graunt, cited above; Andre Armengaud, , ‘Population in Europe 1700–1914’, in Cipolla, Carlo M. (ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe, III, 23–7Google Scholar; Mols, Introduction à la démographie historique, op. cit., I, especially chs. II and IV; Cassedy, James H., Demography in Early America: Beginnings of the Statistical Mind, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. III.

7. See the quotation from King in Glass, ‘Two Papers’, op. cit., 163, n. 15.

8. See also Taylor, A. J., ‘The Taking of the Census, 1801–1951’, British Medical Journal, i (1951)Google Scholar, 718 et passim; Drake, M., ‘The Census, 1801–1951’, in Wrigley, E. A. (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data (Cambridge, 1972)Google Scholar; National Research Council, America's Uncounted People (Washington, 1972).Google Scholar

9. The errors are in the manuscript schedules for Tenison, Sutton, Manners, and Howley streets in the ‘Waterloo Road Second’ sub-district, P.R.O. call number R.G. 9/349. The house numbers are entered in a different ink, and are not properly aligned with the entries for households.

10. This statement is based on tabulation of data for 143 adjacent enumeration districts in Lambeth. These schedules were stored in 18 bundles and the omissions resulted from the destruction of pages at the beginnings and ends of the bundles, as well as from the loss of schedules for one entire sub-district and several institutions. Other researchers have also found flaws in the 1861 returns resulting from careless storage. See Beresford, Maurice, ‘The Unprinted Census Returns of 1841, 1851, 1861 for England and Wales’, Amateur Historian, v (1963), 266, 268.Google Scholar

11. The P.R.O. call number R.G. 9/347, which is supposed to designate returns for part of the ‘Waterloo Road First’ sub-district, is attached to a bundle of returns for a Vauxhall district far to the south. I am indebted to the staff of the P.R.O. for allowing me to see an unpublished map showing the sub-district boundaries.

12. For the mistake and its correction, see the author's unpublished M.A. thesis, ‘Residential Displacement by Railway Construction in North Lambeth, 1858–1861’, University of Sussex, 1967Google Scholar; and the revised version of the same essay, deposited with the thesis in the Sussex University Library.