The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker

Roger Hutchinson

Little, Brown, £20

ANY book about the census, the record of the British population that has been collected since 1801, has to come with a caveat, and in The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker, Roger Hutchinson puts it right up at the front where we can see it. The census comes with a problem, he says, and the problem is people.

More specifically, people do not always tell the truth. People also forget or get things muddled. People might also, for any number of reasons, not want to be included in an official government record of the population. There are also those whose lifestyles may keep them out of reach of the statistics – in the middle of the 19th century, for example, the police estimated there were about 25,000 prostitutes in England and Wales and very few of them would have ended up on a respectable census.

In other words, using the history of the census as a way of building a picture of the British population will always come with flaws attached because it is an attempt to paint a portrait of a self-portrait which is already sketchy. The census has improved as record keeping has, but the problem is still there – the census is not all powerful.

Once you accept that, there is a plenty in The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker that’s rather fascinating, particularly the chapters on how the census started. It was first seriously proposed by government official John Rickman in 1801 and won the support of the Prime Minister William Pitt, although the idea of a record of the population was not new – a census of property owners was taken in the Roman Republic for over 400 years.

And then, of course, there’s the most celebrated event in census history when Caesar Augustus decreed all the world should be taxed and a carpenter called Joseph travelled to his family seat of Bethlehem with his wife Mary. Fortunately, the modern census does not require the inconvenience of being dragged back to your hometown and finding accommodation wherever you can. You can fill it in at home and be done with it.

That is, if you want to fill it in, because the census has always had a political edge to it. Many suffragettes, for example, used it as a means of protest by listing their occupation as “domestic slave”. Others, such as Emmeline Pankhurst, used it in another way. Pankhurst does not appear in the 1911 census because she had returned her form with four words written over it: “No vote no census”

The census was also politicised during the time of the poll tax. A quarter of a million people are thought to have avoided being included in the 1991 census, in the belief – mistaken as it happens - that if they did not appear, it would be harder to track them down for non-payment of the tax.

Nowadays, perhaps we’re more used to the whole idea of the government asking us lots of questions – Hutchinson’s book certainly creates an impression of the census as benign, probably because it is. But what if the census was being proposed for the first time now? Would we react like William Thornton, the MP for York, who called the first census of 1801 an impertinent intrusion which he said was “calculated to divest us of the last remains of our birthright”?

That sounds hysterical, but then again at the end of Hutchinson’s book there is no real sense of the purpose of the census. There are lots of interesting anecdotes about some of the people included in the records in the last 200 years or so, but the book lacks a guiding perspective of the reasons for doing the census in the first place. The founder of the British census John Rickman is quoted as saying that an intimate knowledge of any country can be the only foundation of legislation, but by the end of The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker, I wasn’t sure if that was really true. The book is about what the census is. But to be truly satisfying, the book also needed to tackle another, trickier subject: what the census is for.