Registrar General's Reports for England and Wales, 1879–1898

Edward Higgs

The annual reports of the Registrar General for England and Wales (hereafter ARRG) in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century showed some marked differences to those published earlier in the century. Almost from their inception in 1839 each ARRG usually had two parts. First, there was the Registrar General's own Report, which tended to comment on the development of the registration service, and to emphasize the registration of births and marriages. This was usually supplemented by the Superintendent of Statistics' Letter, containing detailed considerations of the cause of death data collected by the civil registration system, as well as developing epidemiological theory and the tools of public health research (Eyler). A summary of the quarterly returns of deaths also appeared, either as part of the Registrar General's Report, or as a separate appendix.

However, from the Forty-second annual report of the Registrar General for 1879, the separate Superintendent of Statistics' Letter disappeared, although a cut-down version of the summary of causes of disease under headings, that used to appear in his Letter, occurs in the main Report under the heading 'Registered Causes of Death'. The annual reports of the Registrar General in the period 1880 to 1900 were also, on the whole, slighter texts than those of the High Victorian and Edwardian periods. The textual material they contained in the last two decades of the Victorian period seldom exceeded 25 pages, which was only a third or a quarter of the average of the 1870s' reports, and even less when compared to the ARRGs of the first decade of the twentieth century. The text of the ARRGs also lost much of the vivacity and pugnacity of the earlier period. The passages of purple prose, and the exhortations to local authorities to prevent unnecessary loss of life via sanitary reform, were replaced by the rather dry recitation of statistical facts. The wording of some of the Reports in these years was indeed almost identical, with new dates and numbers merely being inserted in consecutive volumes. This did, however, have the advantage of ensuring that the ARRGs now appeared regularly in the year after the year in which the data on births, marriages and deaths were collected.

The most obvious change at the end of the 1870s was the retirement of the pioneering team of Major George Graham and Dr William Farr, the Registrar General and Superintendent of Statistics at the General Register Office (GRO) from the early 1840s onwards. They were replaced by Sir Brydges Henniker, Registrar General from 1880 to 1900, and by two successive Superintendents of Statistics, Dr William Ogle (1880–1893) and Dr John Tatham (1893–1909). However, Simon Szreter sees the apparent malaise in the Office of this period as due to deeper factors, these being:

• the GRO's provision of localised mortality statistics had come to be seen as scientifically outmoded because of the rise of the germ theory of disease causation, and of social darwinism and eugenics, which downgraded the importance of the environmentalism inherent in the Victorian public health movement;

• increased financial stringency, 'heralded with a Treasury minute of 1886, inaugurating a regime of inflexibility and refusal to countenance expansion in staff costs or improvements in pay';

• the development of a "bureaucratic and authoritarian ethos" with the rise of a professional audience for the GRO's output in the growing body of local medical officers of health (Szreter, 454–62).

However, none of these suggested factors can be taken as entirely convincing as an explanation for the decline of the GRO's output in the late Victorian period. The impact of germ theory and eugenics is difficult to substantiate, whilst staffing problems began in the GRO in the 1870s. The GRO might well have become more bureaucratic, but this was probably due to its closer supervision by the Local Government Board, rather than to any influence exerted by medical officers of health. Thus, the changes in the nature of the ARRGs might merely reflect the rather negative influence of Sir Brydges Henniker. Certainly, his removal through ill health in 1900 led to a sudden expansion in both the ARRG and in the staffing of the Office (Higgs, 90–128).

There was a certain amount of rationalisation in the published tables in this period. The changes appear to have been due to the adoption of new arrangements for classification — in previous ARRGs there had been a long list of 273 headings for cause of death in England and Wales and a list of 117 for divisions and counties, so similar headings in the latter might absorb some headings used in the former, and did not necessarily cover the same things. Cause of death in England and Wales was also arranged according to the nomenclature of the Royal College of Physicians, which was changing its classification too. In the early 1880s the decision was taken to arrange the tables in the ARRGs using only one system based on the College's new system (Forty-fourth annual report of the Registrar General, xvii–xviii).

REFERENCES

John M. Eyler, Victorian social medicine. The ideas and methods of William Farr (London, 1979).

Forty-fourth annual report of the Registrar General (1881), BPP 1883 XX. [View this document: Forty-fourth annual report of the registrar-general ]

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

Simon Szreter, 'The GRO and the public health movement in Britain 1837–1914', Social History of Medicine, 4 (1991), 435–64.