The ‘waste of life’ recorded in London's Bills of Mortality between the later seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth was enormous (see figure P.1). At its worst, in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, burials exceeded baptisms by more than 65 per cent, and it is easy to comprehend Dorothy George's sense of death as an omnipresent shadow falling across the life of the contemporary metropolis in all its aspects. Judged by the extraordinary standards of George's encyclopedic London Life in the Eighteenth Century, this book has the relatively limited goal of understanding eighteenth-century London's recorded burial surpluses as a demographic phenomenon – as an outward expression of that underlying cat's cradle of relationships which has come to be termed a ‘vital regime’.

The scale and nature of the eighteenth-century metropolis is nonetheless sufficient to make this a very difficult goal to accomplish. The sources of vital data are abundant, but they are often of uncertain quality and rarely lend themselves to the techniques which have been used so successfully on smaller – and more geographically bounded – populations elsewhere.