A Cultural History of the British Census: Envisioning the Multitude in the Nineteenth Century by Kathrin Levitan, and: Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000 edited by Tom Crook and Glen O’Hara (review)

In the 1980s, social historians and historians of science displayed a newfound interest, from different points of origin, in the nineteenth-century context of quantification. The first group added nuance to the story behind the numbers that framed their own understanding of the past: hence Margo J. Anderson’s masterful The American Census: A Social History (1988) revealed the messy politics underlying demography in the United States, and several demographic historians (including Edward Higgs and Simon Szreter) did the same sort of work in a more technical vein for Britain—building, in turn, on solid foundations laid by Michael J. Cullen and John M. Eyler in the 1970s. Historians of science, meanwhile—with Theodore M. Porter and Ian Hacking leading the way—applied to statistics the same interests in epistemology and culture that were informing the field more generally at the time. The result was a wealth of new information, but also a number of interesting questions that remained unanswered when this first wave of interest passed. The two volumes under review return to this field of inquiry, bringing to the task more recent trends in historiography and expanding the range of sources that might be said to count as examples of statistical thinking.

This is certainly the case with Kathrin Levitan’s impressive monograph on the British census, which (as the title indicates) is a cultural, not a social, history. She rightly concludes that the work of the latter approach has already been largely accomplished, and she summarizes much of it on the way to digging deeper into the census’s cultural significance (the book’s title is less reliable regarding chronology: its “nineteenth century” is very short, ending in 1861). After a basic survey of the origins and mechanics of the census, Levitan arranges the rest of the book thematically, with chapters on the population question, political representation, urbanization, marriage and the family, colonial censuses, and “challenges and alternatives” to the census. Throughout, her focus shifts between data generation and popular reception: the ways in which people created census categories and did the counting, and the ways in which people used the census to help them think about wider issues.

The strongest examples of Levitan’s approach appear in the chapters on political representation and on “challenges and alternatives.” Fans of Elaine Hadley’s recent work on “practical citizenship” will find much to admire in the first of these chapters, which broadens our understanding of what population data meant for politics in the early Victorian era. Although Britain lagged far behind the United States in directly deriving electoral districts from census data, such information did inform relative funding of local police forces and allocation of charitable donations. Levitan also reveals the census at work in shaping the Corn Law debate, shifting public opinion against rotten boroughs, and fueling boosterism in rapidly growing towns. On the last point, we see glimmers of the modern concept of a metropolitan area emerging when residents of Manchester argued that Salford should be included in their population, after the 1851 census made it look like Liverpool had more people.

Levitan’s chapter on critiques of the census provides a useful corrective to what otherwise veers toward a Whiggish narrative: besides giving due time to usual suspects like Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, who famously held the census in contempt, she turns up revealing moments of dissent in more obscure corners, such as John Eagles’s articles in Blackwood’s Magazine and The Census: A Farce, in One...