A Cultural History of the British Census: Envisioning the Multitude in the Nineteenth Century

The British census plays an unquestioned role in governance today, and the recent digitization of nineteenth 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.