Content associated with: Fourth annual report of the registrar-general Page 132
Registrar General's Reports for England and Wales, 1838–1858
Edward Higgs
When the General Register Office (GRO) was set up by the 1836 Registration Act it was unlikely that Parliament envisaged it producing a very extensive programme of statistical reports. When debating the proposals, MPs made very little reference to statistical production, and concentrated mainly on the benefits to property holders and Nonconformists of a civil system of recording births, marriages and deaths. The need to record legal lines of descent for the transmission of title to property, and to remove the need for Dissenters to register their vital events with the clergymen of the Church of England, were to the fore (Cullen; Higgs, 1–21). The original Registration Bill did not even mention what was to become the mainstay of the GRO's future production of medical statistics in its Reports: the recording of causes of death. That seems to have been smuggled into the 1836 Act on the initiative of Edwin Chadwick, secretary to the Poor Law Commission (Higgs, 22–9).
At first there was no mention of a statistical department in the correspondence that the first Registrar General for England and Wales, Thomas Lister, had with the Treasury over staffing (Higgs, 29–34). Nor did the Registration Act authorise an extensive publication programme. It merely indicated that "the Registrar General shall send once in every year to one of the principal secretaries of state a general abstract of the numbers of births, deaths and marriages registered during the foregoing year in such form as the said secretary from time to time shall require..." (6 & 7 Will. 4, s.6). Much of the subsequent development of the GRO's statistical reporting was the result, therefore, of administrative action. This reflected the interests of the GRO's own officers, and the demand from government departments and Parliament for demographic and medical data (Higgs, 34–89). The GRO was able to carve out a niche as a statistical powerhouse, providing data on mortality rates and causes of death that helped to underpin public health and sanitary reform (Szreter).
The rather tenuous basis upon which the GRO's statistical output was founded is revealed in the manner in which the early reports were structured. The first annual report of the Registrar General (hereafter ARRG) was made up of the Register General's own Report giving a brief commentary of the numbers of births, marriages and deaths in the year ending 30 June 1838, and a series of 16 appendices. Most of these (A to O) were reproductions of circular letters and rules sent out to various officials involved in registration. Appendix P, however, was a letter from the GRO's compiler of statistics, William Farr, to the Registrar General, discussing the medical and public health aspects of the causes of death data in more detail (First annual report of the Registrar General). From the second ARRG Farr's 'Letter' was the only appendix to the Registrar General's Report. Despite Farr's 'Letters' being published within the Reports they were supposed not to be 'official', thus their publication as appendices was an inventive way of getting round the limited authorization given to the GRO's statistical output, and became a feature of the ARRG for the next 40 years and more.
It would be wrong, however, to imagine that Farr's 'Letter' was necessarily a constant feature of the early ARRGs. There was no such Letter, for example, in the 7th ARRG for 1843 and 1844, the 9th ARRG for 1846, the 10th ARRG for 1847, or the 11th ARRG for 1848. This may, in part, reflect distraction elsewhere, since the GRO was preparing for the extensive 1851 census in the late 1840s. This may also explain the increasing interval between the collection of registration data and the publication of the ARRG. In the beginning of the 1840s the ARRG was published in the year after the period it covered, but by the early 1850s three or four years might pass before the full ARRG appeared. In the period up to about 1857 the GRO actually produced two versions of the ARRG, one that was laid before Parliament and another that was distributed separately to registration officers, medical practitioners and the press. These usually contained only minor differences, but in the case of the ARRGs for 1847 through to 1854, the ARRG that appeared as a Parliamentary Paper only gave brief abstracts of births, marriages and deaths, whilst the full ARRG appeared separately a few years later (Higgs, 221–4).
Nor was it the case that Farr's Letter was the only part of the ARRG that contained theoretical discussions. In very general terms, Farr's Letter contained detailed considerations of the cause of death data collected by the civil registration system, as well as developing epidemiological theory and the tools of public health research (Eyler). The Registrar General's own Report commented on the development of the registration service, and gave greater emphasis to the registration of births and marriages. But in the 14th ARRG for 1851 one can still find the Registrar General, Major George Graham, discussing occupational mortality (Fourteenth annual report of the Registrar General, i–xxiii). There are indeed times when scholars have quoted from Graham's Reports but attributed the quotes to Farr (Higgs, 70). Similarly, Farr could use his Letter to discuss matters other than cause of death data, as in the 16th ARRG for 1853 in which he reported on his attendance at the 1855 International Statistical Congress in Paris (Sixteenth Annual Report of the Registrar General for 1853, 106–24).
One theme that ran through both the Registrar General's Report and Farr's Letter in these years was the collection of data for the production of actuarial tables to be used in insurance schemes. A strong case can be made for this activity, rather than the production of medical statistics, as being the reason for the establishment of the GRO's Statistical Department in the first place (Higgs, 22–34). Much of Graham's own section in his second ARRG was, for example, given over to a discussion of the construction of life tables for actuarial purposes, and contained a simple 'English Life Table No. 1' (Fifth Annual Report of the Registrar General, 16–49). Reporting of mortality by age and place was often more extensive than that by cause in the 1840s. In the ARRG for 1845, for example, there were over 100 pages of tables for the former, but only 16 pages by causes of death (Eighth annual report of the Registrar General, 82–97, 16–286). Similarly, Farr's Letter in the ARRG for 1845 was mostly given over to a consideration of problems with the construction of Richard Price's Northampton Life Table, upon which much insurance work was based (Eighth annual report of the Registrar General, 277–356). The Letter in the ARRG for 1849 was again concerned mainly with life insurance, including the publication of a second English Life Table for males as a prelude to 152 pages of actuarial tables and calculations (Twelfth annual report of the Registrar General, 1–152.). But this activity declined from the 1850s onwards, as other providers of actuarial information came forward and the GRO's medical activities burgeoned (Higgs, 34–40).
REFERENCES
M. J. Cullen, 'The making of the Civil Registration Act of 1836', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 25 (1974), 39–59.
Eighth annual report of the Registrar General (1845), BPP 1847–48 XXV (967) [View this document: Eighth annual report of the registrar-general]
John M. Eyler, Victorian social medicine. The ideas and methods of William Farr (London, 1979).
First annual report of the Registrar General (1836) BPP 1839 XVI (187) [View this document: First annual report of the registrar-general]
Fifth annual report of the Registrar General (1841) BPP 1843 XXI. (516) [View this document: Fifth annual report of the registrar-general]
Fourteenth annual report of the Registrar General for 1851 (London, 1855). [View this document: Fourteenth annual report of the registrar-general (Registrar-general's edition)]
Edward Higgs, Life, death and statistics: civil registration, censuses and the work of the General Register Office, 1837–1952 (Hatfield, 2004).
Simon Szreter, 'The GRO and the public health movement in Britain 1837–1914', Social History of Medicine, 4 (1991), 435–64.
Sixteenth annual report of the Registrar General for 1853 (London, 1856). [View this document: Sixteenth annual report of the registrar-general (Registrar-general's edition)]
Twelfth annual report of the Registrar General (1849), BPP 1851 XXII (1416). [View this document: Twelfth annual report of the registrar-general ]