Description: "The British census plays an unquestioned role in governance today, and the recent digitization of 19th-century census data has allowed millions of amateur and professional researchers to visualize their national and familial past. This study tells the tangled story of how the census took shape over the early decades of its existence, developing from a simple counting of households during the Napoleonic Wars into a centralized undertaking that involved the governmental and intellectual luminaries of Victorian Britain. Along the way, the census intertwined with the pressing questions of the day, including Malthusianism, industrialization, political representation, Irish immigration, women's employment, reproduction, and empire. The book explores the hotly disputed process by which the census was created and developed and examines how a wide cast of characters, including statisticians, novelists, national and local officials, political and social reformers, and journalists responded to and used the idea of a census. It shows that the act of describing British society in statistical terms was also an act of contestation"--Provided by publisher.
Review Quotes:
'Kathrin Levitan's A Cultural History of the British Census is a useful and engaging study about the meaning of the census in British society. In addition to shining new light on an old source and convincingly asserting its importance to British conceptions of themselves, it is also a well-crafted intellectual history that traces ideas about belonging identity in Britain through the transformations of nineteenth-century politics.' Cercles
'If for Lord Macaulay, "figures are like mercenaries: they may be enlisted on both sides", in Levitan the census has found a historian who is even-handed and wide-ranging in her survey of these battlefields.' - Robert Mayhew, TLS
"Provides an original approach, and the result will need to be engaged with by all historians working on modern Britain ... The book is well researched and clearly written, and scholars of literature as well as history will find important material here." - The American Historical Review