Institutions

Edward Higgs

The British censuses were always based primarily on the collection of information relating to families or households. In the period 1801 to 1831, a clerk of the House of Commons, John Rickman, sent the overseers of the poor in each parish in England and Wales, or 'other substantial householders', a form on which they were to indicate the number of families, men and women in their parishes, along with the numbers employed in various economic categories. In Scotland the task fell on the local schoolmaster (Higgs, 1989, 4–7). But it is unclear how Rickman intended overseers to deal with those people in institutions such as prisons, workhouses, almshouses, hospitals, infirmaries, asylums, schools, and barracks. Perhaps, they were just treated as the rest of the parish population, each institution counting as a 'family'.

On Rickman's death in 1840, responsibility for taking the British census passed to the General Register Office (GRO) in London. The GRO had been set up in the wake of the Registration and Marriages Acts of 1836, and the Registrar General appointed as head of the national system of civil registration in England and Wales. England and Wales were divided up into registration districts, based upon the Poor Law unions, and a superintendent registrar appointed for each. These areas were further subdivided into sub-districts and part-time registrars appointed to them. These officers were responsible for the registration of births, marriages and deaths within their sub-districts, and the forwarding of this data to the GRO in London (Higgs, 2004, 1–21). All that was necessary to turn this into an administrative system for the census, was for the registrars to divide their sub-districts into smaller enumeration districts and to appoint temporary enumerators for each. These collected the necessary data by giving householders schedules on which they entered the details regarding the inmates of their households on Census Night. Prior to 1911, the enumerators copied these returns into enumeration books that would be sent via the registrar and superintendent to the GRO for central analysis and the publication of results in the same manner as data on vital statistics. From 1911 onwards they only sent the original household schedules to London.

The post-1831 system was based, therefore, on the assumption that people lived in households. But what happened if people were present in institutions, however temporarily, on Census night? In order to enumerate these people the GRO developed a special set of procedures. During the planning stage of the census, the local registrars had to forward to London a list of all institutions (defined as every gaol, prison, penitentiary, house of correction, hulk or prison ship, workhouse, almshouse, hospital, infirmary, asylum, madhouse, public school, endowed school, college, barrack, and 'other public or charitable institution') in their district with the number of their inmates. If over a certain size, these were to be enumerated separately by the chief residing officer on a special institutional schedule that was sent directly by them to the GRO. In the year 1851 to 1881, the critical size appears to have been 200 inmates, but this was reduced to 100 in 1891. Smaller institutions were to be treated as households, and included in the normal household returns. Since the census was taken several months after the superintendent registrars made their surveys of institutions, some exceeding the critical size on census night were treated as normal households whilst others containing less than that number were enumerated in the special institutional books (Higgs, 1989, 37–8).

The quality of information in the institutional returns varied according to the conscientiousness of the officers, and the types of inmates being enumerated. Very young children at boarding school might not know their place of birth, whilst elderly people in workhouses might not have been recorded as having any occupations. The returns relating to occupations are frequently of poor quality. It is almost impossible to reconstruct the possible relationships between inmates within institutions since only their status within the institution was given. In 1861 it is even difficult to identify inmates by name, since only initials needed to be returned.

The reporting of information on institutions and their populations in the Census reports was somewhat haphazard. Sometimes institutions were regarded as buildings, and at other times their inhabitants were conflated with similar individuals not in institutions, as in the case of the asylum population and the insane cared for at home. From 1851 onwards information published in textual and tabular form in the Reports generally gave details of the number and ages of the inmates of prisons, workhouses, hospitals of different kinds, and of other institutions found in the returns. This does not, of course, allow one to estimate levels of insanity, ill health or crime, because the numbers reflected, in part, the changing numbers of such institutions, and of access or recourse to them. In the case of prisons, workhouses and mental hospitals, tables showing the occupations, or former occupations, of their inmates were given in some of the Reports.

Over time, the impression is of a declining interest in institutions in their own right. Thus, the high point of reporting on institutions was probably the General report for the 1871 census. This had large sections devoted to institutions for the blind, deaf-and-dumb, 'idiots', and the insane, as well as discussions on paupers in the workhouse, and persons in prisons, reformatories and industrial schools. With respect to the latter, the Report declared that, 'the evils and burdens inflicted on society by the criminal classes are so great that no labour would be ill-bestowed in the collection of full and accurate information respecting them as the basis of measures calculated to thin their ranks, whether by improved penal and reformatory discipline or by preventative agencies' (Census of England and Wales, 1871, lxxi). However, the 1881 General report did not even discuss prisoners, or institutions, directly, and later Reports only did so cursorily.

REFERENCES

Census of England and Wales, 1871, Vol. IV. General Report BPP 1873 LXXI Pt. II. [View this document: General report, England and Wales. 1871]

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

Edward Higgs, Life, death and statistics: civil registration, censuses and the work of the General Register Office, 1837–1952 (Hatfield, 2004).