Tricks of the trades

Oddly enough, one of the most historically influential pieces of British writing has turned out to be an essay that appeared in the June 1800 issue of the Commercial, Agricultural and Manufacturers Magazine. Over the preceding decades, there’d been much anguished debate about the size of the country’s population. Many commentators were convinced that, thanks to the gin craze, it was in potentially disastrous decline. Others, led by Thomas Malthus, were convinced that it was on the potentially disastrous rise. The biggest question of all, though, was what the population actually was, with most estimates — or, as it transpired, wild guesses — ranging from four million to six million. But then, in that 1800 essay, amid his magazine’s more usual fare of articles on manure and cowpox, the editor John Rickman came up with a radical suggestion: why not count it?

Fortunately, he was sufficiently well-connected for his argument to be taken up by a couple of friendly MPs — and, with the government desperate to know how many soldiers it might be able to muster against Napoleon, Britain’s first census was soon commissioned, under Rickman’s direction.