Recorded History
Proposed changes to the way the census is compiled may hinder future historians’ understanding of the past.
In a completely undemocratic –even anti-democratic – kingdom ruled by an oligarchy of wealth, the national government of Pitt the Younger began something with enormous democratic potential when the first Census Act was passed in 1800. It followed the lead in 1790 of the new republic of the United States in sanctioning the costly exercise of taking a nationwide census enumeration, though not, as in the new American republic, in order to apportion votes more equitably among the rapidly expanding federated states of the Union. The first four censuses of the United Kingdom merely counted the population. However, with the fifth census of 1841, the democratic potential of the exercise became manifest with a new household form designed to record by name, age, sex and relationship to the head of the household the whereabouts and occupations of every person alive in the United Kingdom on ‘census night’.
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