Even before the first census was made in 1801, the plan was regarded with fear, hatred and ridicule. And this year, on 21 March, households have another chance to mock, embrace or ignore the census.
When parliament debated a bill in 1753 for an annual census, Matthew Ridley, MP for Newcastle, warned that his constituents ‘looked on the proposal as ominous, and feared lest some public misfortune or an epidemical distemper should follow’.
They were aware that, by the Bible’s account, ‘Satan rose up against Israel and caused David to take a census of the people of Israel’. God was so angry that he gave the King three choices: seven years of famine, three months of fleeing his enemies or three days of pestilence. He chose the last and 70,000 died. In our age of QAnon, we need not feel so superior to the Geordies’ fears.
We have surely lost sight of what in 1753 seemed to William Thornton, MP for York, the chief issue: liberty. ‘I did not believe that there was any set of men, or, indeed, any individual of the human species, so presumptuous and so abandoned as to make the proposal we have just heard,’ he said when the bill was introduced. It was just an instrument to extract taxes, ‘the most effectual engine of rapacity and oppression that was ever used against an injured people’. Thornton threatened to order his servants to show any census enumerator ‘the discipline of my horse pond’.
Nothing came of these first attempts, but by 1801, a new outlook possessed the ruling caste. All the talk was of Malthus and population. But perfectabilian appetites outran data-collecting ability. In 1801, ten out of 12 Welsh counties failed to make full returns.
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