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.
In fact, suspicion of what the government was up to made the 1801 census a fairly hit-and-miss affair. Nonetheless, its figure of around 15 million for the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland wasn’t too far wide of the mark. It was also considered successful enough for a census to be recommissioned every ten years from then on, with ever more accuracy, and ever more information about the inhabitants’ lives. By 1831, Rickman was convinced that he’d seen off both sets of doom-mongers by proving that the country’s population and prosperity were growing together nicely.
Using the census records as the basis for a history of Britain is clearly an excellent idea for a book.
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