Local Communities in the Victorian Census Enumerators' Books (review)

Any social historian of nineteenth-century Britain will be aware of the value of the Census Enumerators’ Books as a primary source. This book compiles twenty-five articles, all originally published in the English journal, Local Population Studies, each of which draws in some manner on this indispensible primary source. The editors have divided the volume into six sections, for each of which they provide an introductory essay.

The articles themselves are uneven, both in quality and in length. Considered as a whole, they give a good sense of the extraordinary range of questions on which the Census Enumerators’ Books can be made to shed light, especially if the population studied is carefully delimited; if the researchers are prepared to engage in exacting, detailed, and time-consuming investigation; and if the census households can successfully be linked with evidence from other sources—city directories, parish registers, registration certificates, estate records, tax lists, and ordnance survey or tithe maps, as well as a host of qualitative evidence in which local social or economic history is revealed. One can only marvel at the ingenuity of these researchers. Who would have thought to use the Census Enumerators’ Books to generate a social profile of seaside holiday makers, to trace local versus regional in- and out-migration, to examine the economic consequences of deforestation, to explore typical patterns of working-class lifetime employment, or to document the demographic consequences of de-industrialization?

Yet, ingenious as the best of these studies are, they display a narrow focus that rarely questions the utility or significance of their results. In fact, many of the individual studies are directed toward testing and assessing the reliability of the information that the census takers recorded, rather than using this information to shed light on the social, economic, residential, or family structure of nineteenth-century Britain. For this reason, this volume will be of use primarily to prospective researchers who intend to use the Census Enumerators Books’, and who need to know both the possibilities and the pitfalls inherent in relying on this source.

Surveying the vast literature of quantitative history, of which this volume samples only one small part, the editors lament the irony that “the proliferation of personal computers has not led to an increase in the number of publications based on the <F48665>ceb<F255>‘s [Census Enumerators’ Books].” They attribute this situation to the fact that “both the source and the quantitative approach have had to compete with other ‘fashions’” (3). Their own volume, however, suggests another reason. After more than three decades, the use of quantification as a technique in British social history may be reaching the point of diminishing returns. The most significant findings in this book are those that we already knew. Most of what we did not know seems of limited significance in delineating the major contours of the Victorian social structure, or in explaining the fundamental processes of early industrial social change. Hopefully, readers of these essays will be motivated to go beyond them. The Census Enumerators’ Books are an indispensable source. Paradoxically, however, their value is often most evident in studies that are grounded in other materials, and oriented toward answering questions for which the Census Enumerators’ Books were not specifically designed.