1 The Act laid down that the new Poor Law Unions should be the basis of superintendent registrars' districts, these being further subdivided into registrars' districts for births and deaths registration. Births and deaths were to be registered by householders and next of kin under a prescribed form within set times, after which a fee would be payable. The death certificate asked for the date of death, name, age, sex, rank or profession and cause of death of the deceased. Duplicates of the entries in the registers were to be sent to the GRO in London, which was to be headed by a Registrar General.

2 In summary the ‘MacDonagh Thesis ‘is that the growth of the state in the early Victorian period reflected a process whereby the exposure of ‘intolerable situations ‘forced Parliament to pass permissive or enabling legislation, and later to appoint inspectors or other ‘experts’to oversee the new legislation. As these officers responded to the continuing needs of their clients and their consciences, they pressed for further compulsory legislation, and for a superintending central body to oversee it; see MacDonagh, Oliver, ‘The nineteenth-century revolution in government: a reappraisal’, The Historical Journal I, 1 (1958), 52–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A pattern of government growth. The Passenger Acts and their enforcement 1800–1860 (London, 1961)Google Scholar; and Early Victorian government 1830–1870 (London, 1977).Google Scholar

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5 This argument is rehearsed in Finer, S. E., The life and times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London, 1952), 125Google Scholar; Lewis, R. A., Edwin Chadwick and the public health movement 1832–1854 (London, 1952), 31Google Scholar; Flinn, M. W., ‘Introduction’, to Chadwick, Edwin, Report on the sanitary condition of the labouring population of Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1965 edn), 27–9Google Scholar; Glass, D. V., Numbering the people (Farnborough, 1973), 118–19Google Scholar; Cullen, M. J., ‘The making of the Civil Registration Act of 1836’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History XXV (1914), 39–59Google Scholar; Eyler, John M., Victorian social medicine. The ideas and methods of William Farr (London, 1979), 37Google Scholar; Nissel, Muriel, People count. A history of the General Register Office (London, 1987), 10–11Google Scholar; Goldman, Lawrence, ‘Statistics and the society of science in early Victorian Britain; an intellectual context for the General Register Office’, Social History of Medicine 4 (1991), 418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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