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Historical research from census enumerators' books

Edward Higgs

The British Census Reports were based on the abstraction of information by the staff of the General Register Office (GRO) from the original manuscript returns made by census enumerators. Despite their great value, the published Census Reports do not contain an exhaustive analysis of those returns, being limited by the means of data handling at the GRO's disposal and the limited range of questions that it saw fit to ask off the data. However, the Census Enumerators' Books (CEBs) came to be preserved in the Public Record Office, now the National Archives, London, which always saw the research potential of this material (Higgs, 1989, 19–20). Given that the census returns place the vast majority of British people temporally (on Census Night), geographically (by address), and socially (by household position and occupation), this was not suprising.

Almost as soon as the CEBs came to be publicly available in the archives when they were 100 years old, interest began to be shown in them. A. J. Taylor published an appreciation of the census returns as early as 1951, and Richard Lawton produced an analysis of the characteristics of the population of Liverpool at time of the 1851 census in 1956 (Taylor, 1951; Lawton, 1956). The increasing availability of multiple sets of CEBs, released every ten years, allowed the analysis of historical change. This was coupled in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the spread of humanities computing in higher education institutions, and the belief that quantification of aggregate data would allow History to become a social science. There was also a burgeoning interest in 'history from below', which would allow historians to focus on the mass of 'the people' rather than on the doings of kings, queens and politicians. This led to a rapid expansion in the number of studies based on the CEBs in these years (Mills and Pearce, 1989, 7).

The period saw the publication of key monographs based on the source, such as Michael Anderson's Family structure in nineteenth century Lancashire (1971), Armstrong's Stability and change in an English county town: a social study of York 1801–51 (1974), and Foster's Class struggle and the industrial revolution (1974). These, and the historiographical essays in edited volumes such as Wrigley's Nineteenth-century society (1972) and Lawton's The census and social structure (1978), explored the uses and problems with the CEBs as an historical source, and developed many of the techniques of analysis that have been widely used by other researchers subsequently. Especially important here was the elaboration of various classification systems, covering socio-economic groupings, industrial sectors, life-cycle stages, and so on, which allowed historians to compare differing communities based on standardised techniques. The following decades saw the appearance of a number of archivally-based guides to the CEBs, which ran into several editions (Gibson, 1979; Higgs, 1989; Lumas, 1992).

The late 1980s and 1990s saw something of a falling off in the number of high-profile academic works based on the source (Mills and Pearce, 1989, 7). This probably reflected a change in intellectual fashion as the quantitative social history of the 1960s and 1970s began to seem less 'cutting edge' compared to cultural history. Language rather than numbers appeared to be the key historiographical concept of the age. However, the quantitative analysis of the CEBs had become a staple of postgraduate research projects, especially in local demographic history. In the local context it has also proved easier to link the CEBs to other sources. Many examples of this work can be found in the contributions to the journal Local Population Studies, first issued in 1968 as the Local Population Studies Magazine and Newsletter. Selected articles from the journal have been published in Mills and Schürer's edited collection Local communities in the Victorian census enumerators' books (1996).

In recent years there has been perhaps renewed interest in the source, as in the case of Garrett, Reid, Schürer and Szreter's Changing family size in England and Wales: place, class and demography 1891–1911 (2001). Here special arrangements have been made to allow the authors access to anonymised local digital datasets from censuses currently closed to the public. Access to publicly available digitised datasets from the CEBs held at the AHDS-History service at the Data Archive at the University of Essex (AHDS History) may also help to rekindle interest. A digitised version of the British census of 1881 now forms part of the North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP), which is a machine-readable database of the complete censuses of Canada (1881), Great Britain (1881), Iceland (1870, 1880, 1901), Norway (1865, 1900), and the United States (1880) (North Atlantic Population Project). It is intended that this will encourage the analysis of census data on a global scale.

REFERENCES

Michael Anderson, Family structure in nineteenth century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971).

W. A. Armstrong, Stability and change in an English country town. A social study of York 1801–51 (London, 1974).

John Foster, Class struggle and the industrial revolution: early industrial capitalism in three English towns (London, 1974).

Eilidh Garrett, Alice Reid, Kevin Schürer and Simon Szreter, Changing family size in England and Wales: place, class and demography 1891–1911 (Cambridge, 2001).

J. S. W. Gibson, Census returns, 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, on microfilm : a directory to local holdings (Banbury, 1979).

Edward Higgs, Making sense of the census. The manuscript returns for England and Wales, 1801–1901 (London, 1989).

Richard Lawton, 'The population of Liverpool in the mid-19th century', Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 107 (1956), 89–120.

Richard Lawton, ed., The census and social structure: an interpretative guide to nineteenth century censuses for England and Wales (London, 1978).

Susan Lumas, Making Use of the Census (London: PRO Publications, 1992).

Dennis Mills and Carol Pearce, People and places in the Victorian Census. A review and bibliography of publications based substantially on the manuscript census enumerators' books, 1841–1911 ([n.p.], 1989).

Dennis Mills and Kevin Schürer, eds, Local communities in the Victorian Census Enumerators' Books (Oxford, 1996).

A. J. Taylor, 'The taking of the census, 1801–1951', British Medical Journal, 1 (1951), 715–20.

E. A. Wrigley, ed., Nineteenth-century society (Cambridge, 1972).