Each section of the exhibition (families and households, health, employment and migration) includes examples of data from censuses alongside materials which illustrate how life in Britain is changing, and the issues of most concern. Visitors will be able to see photographs, maps, public information broadcasts and cartoons, alongside insights from the census data itself.

From the first modern attempt to introduce a census to England in 1753, the idea has generated interest and strong emotion. The census has always been an occasion for satire, subversion and resistance. The exhibition looks at some of the controversies and some of the ways in which the census has been used as an opportunity in wider political campaigns.

Alongside issues of national or state interest, historic census records have increasingly been used by people with a personal interest in their family or local history. Copies of census returns for Annie Besant, the political author and campaigner, will be on display to show what these records can tell us about an individual and family life.

The exhibition describes some of the people and works surrounding early calls for a more detailed population count, including the first edition of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), and John Graunt’s Natural and Political Observations, written some hundred years earlier.

From 1851 onwards, the census was generating data on a scale and at a level of detail unprecedented in Britain. The reporting of census results provided new challenges in statistical representation, and encouraged new ways of thinking about the public presentation of data. The exhibition features examples of 19^th century innovation such as Augustus Petermann’s population density map (1841), one of the earliest of its kind. Census reports from Ireland, in several ways more sophisticated than their British counterparts during the 19^th century, feature the early use of colour in charts and maps, surprising for official publications from this time.

Census & Society: why everyone counts displays more than the official representation of results. The census, and our reactions to it, have been satirised in cartoons from its beginnings through to present day. The exhibition features a church sermon, play, poem and a rap.

Ian Cooke, Social Science Curator at the British Library, said:

“The census, and the way that we respond to it, provides rich insights into many aspects of our daily lives and families. In Census & Society we illustrate issues that have been and remain important to us. As well as urgent and serious concerns, we also include more playful and creative reactions to the census.”

For more information, please visit: www.bl.uk/census