The National Sample from the 1851 Census of Great Britain: Sampling and data handling procedures

Abstract

Over the past two decades the enumerators' books of the nineteenth-century censuses have rightly become one of the major sources for the study of nineteenth-century social structure. Containing as they do, for the whole population of Great Britain, information on name, residence, marital status, relationship to household head, sex, age, occupation, birthplace and infirmity of sight or hearing, they have made possible a wide range of studies of, for example, patterns of residence, household composition, occupational structure, migration, age of marriage, patterns of education and farm labour utilization. Linked to other sources or bodies of material they have been used in studies of class consciousness, voting, voluntary association membership, property ownership and development, farming, poverty, the employment of married women and servant keeping, to name but a few.