A Comparative View
1826 · Life Tables · Work 500 of 1,871
A printed octavo volume of 1826 lying open on a plain desk beside a ruled sheet of mortality figures in columns, a printed schedule of premium rates in ruled columns pinned above it, a blank printed policy form squared to the edge of the desk, the paper cream, a plain steel pen laid across the ruled sheet, a small brass inkwell at the far corner, the desk top grey and plain, the desk seen from directly above, even flat light from above.
- What it was used for
- Babbage's book on the life assurance offices, London 1826, printed for J. Mawman: xxxi and 170 pages, plus 27 pages and a folding letterpress table. It sets the premiums and profit arrangements of the London societies side by side, with premium tables, annual payments and mortality figures, among them those of the Equitable Society. It was addressed not to professionals but to buyers. In the preface Babbage remarks that the knowledge of the persons in these posts is exceedingly various and passes through all degrees, from the most superficial acquirements derived merely from the routine of an office up to the most profound knowledge of the subject (pp. xi-xii).
- What was new
- Babbage himself claimed little novelty for the book: most of its facts were already before the public, and Baily had already sketched the offices then existing; the many new ones now needed a whole volume. The 2023 Springer volume reads the book as Babbage using the financial crisis of 1825 to argue for applied mathematical analysis, which he believed could lift the business above speculation; reviews followed in the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review in 1827 and in the American Quarterly Review in 1832. The barb: Babbage had gained the expertise for it for a company that never opened: according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, quoted in an antiquarian description, he was to be director and actuary of the Protector Life Assurance Company and computed new life tables for it; its launch was abandoned the day before the planned 1 July 1824.
Further reading
- Charles Babbage: A comparative view of the various institutions for the assurance of lives (1826), Internet Archive
- Babbage's Age of Speculation: Calculating the Valü of Life After the Repeal of the Bubble Act (Springer, 2023)
- Governing the Computers: The London Stock Exchange, the Institute of Actuaries (Zitat Babbage 1826, S. xi-xii)
- Nigel Phillips Rare Books: Babbage, A Comparative View (1826) - bibliographische Beschreibung