Born in 1801 out of the exigencies of the French Wars, the British decennial census greatly expanded its categorical palette and social reach through the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Rather than merely an instrument of governance recruited to calculate aspects of subsistence and military recruitment, it emerged as a multifaceted civic project; a tool of reform, state building, and nation making; and a fodder for political controversies and sometimes-heated public exchanges.

In recent decades, there has been an avalanche of critical and historical studies of post-Enlightenment social investigations and the rise of statistical thinking. What set the census apart among numerous investigative enterprises that became a hallmark of British public culture was its scale and comprehensiveness. While much of nineteenth-century social inquiry concentrated on the outskirts of British society—for example, child laborers, urban poor, asylum inmates, slum dwellers—the census constituted a technology of social measurement that had in its viewfinder British society in its totality. This ostensibly all-encompassing portraiture, still rather crude, contributed to a normative conception of the social body that prescribed “healthy” or “natural” proportions among different segments of the population. Moreover, whereas the census signified the unity of the nation, it also pointed to social groups that were deemed unproductive or even redundant.

Kathrin Levitan dedicates much of her monograph to the contending inclusionary/exclusionary pull of the British census from 1801 to 1861. Thematic chapters address the history of the census as a national undertaking, the conceptions of population redundancy and surplus, the census and political representation, and census takers' focus on the urban poor, marriage and single women, and race and ethnicity. The book concludes with a comparative discussion of the census in the colonies and Ireland and a useful chapter on opposition and resistance to the census and to statistical reasoning in general. The census was couched as a collective and even leveling self-study. It defined the nation as the locus of analysis and identification. But as Levitan perceptively observes, it conversely allowed Britons to imagine social cleavages and to recognize themselves as part of distinct and discrete social segments represented in the language of abstract numbers.

In 1853, the Manchester Guardian celebrated the census as one of the wonders of the world, comparable to the pyramids or the elevation of Colossus. Such hyperbole betrayed a midcentury British self-confidence. Earlier in the century, the census was conducted under Malthusian pessimism about overpopulation, increasingly compounded by fears of impending class war. By the 1850s, however, these concerns all but evaporated, replaced with pride in population growth, economical prosperity, and an “age of equipoise” sense of social harmony. In the process, the census, originally controlled by Tories such as Charles Abbot and John Rickman, became a quintessential Whig and later Liberal project, especially following the influential 1830s Statistical Movement and the institution of a permanent state knowledge apparatus, most notably, the Office of the Registrar-General (1837).

Nevertheless, lingering demographic anxieties refocused on particular segments that were labeled unproductive—whether the idle or the criminal classes—or even redundant or superfluous, as in the famous case of the census-inspired early 1850s public debate over the “surplus” of unmarried women in Britain, which prompted schemes of emigration and conversely calls to expand women's career opportunities. Other groups, for instance Irish laborers, were also considered a prospective threat once their relative numbers exceeded particular proportions. The physical and moral quality of the British population, and the specter of depopulation, continued to engage census takers and other statisticians, a preoccupation that in later decades would became more pronouncedly intertwined with ideas about national vigor and race.

As have other recent scholars, Levitan vies to depart from a rigid Foucaultian paradigm, which associates social knowledge exclusively with surveillance and social control, in favor of a more open-ended approach, compellingly situating the census as a feature of the public sphere, open to divergent appropriations. However, the book's theoretical framework is somewhat underdeveloped, even muddled at times. The book would have also benefited from more precise and varied prose. Much of the discussion is dedicated to the ideologies of gender, domesticity, poverty, public health, and ethnicity. Indeed, the census reports were platforms for the (sometimes gratuitous) articulation of Victorian discourse. Yet, and despite its obvious importance, these ideological terrains as well as some of their chief spokesmen (e.g., William Farr, James Kay, Hector Gavin, and W. R. Greg) are by now quite familiar.

The book offers more substantial contributions when it veers beyond these discourses to explore the actual administration of the census and the deployment of census material in concrete political discussions. Early in the century, the Overseers of the Poor garnered census data in the parishes. Beginning in 1841, census returns were circulated and collected by government-appointed enumerators and filled out over a single night by each and every “head of household.” For the first time, census forms listed the names and particulars of every member of the household, which in affluent families included servants. The census thus concurrently confirmed the single-house bourgeois family (and its head) as the kernel of society as it also partook in the process of individuation. Beyond the bounds of the family and local communities, individuals now stood in relation to aggregated national groups, differentiated by social categories such as occupation, age, and gender. Just as important, the ritual of taking the census and of interacting with the state became the shared—and importantly, concurrent—experience of the British nation.

Unlike the US census, the British census was not instituted to draw voting districts. Nevertheless, as Levitan demonstrates, the census became entangled with the question of political representation. Census data was employed in support of the Reform Act (1832) and was later featured in Chartist propaganda. The census propped a new politics of demographics, endowing emerging groups and interests (e.g., urban communities or industry) with stronger claims on tangible and symbolic resources. The state tacitly negotiated the cooperation of the people, not always an easy task. It did so in part by unleashing the rhetoric of equality before the census. Government also had to guarantee the privacy of individuals and avoid incendiary topics. For that reason, the British census was noticeably less intrusive than similar undertakings in the colonies. There was a modicum of risk for the state in census results. The 1851 census on religious communities purported to show an almost equal number of Anglicans and Dissenters. Threatening the status of the Church of England, the poll prompted an enormous controversy and also evidenced the precariousness of statistical research into matters of identity and affiliation. Consequent schemes to inquire into the comparative size of religious communities had to be abandoned for another 150 years—until 2001. In different ways, therefore, the census related to the process of democratization as it also contained strong coercive dimensions, especially for its capacity to define the boundary between the normal and the aberrant.