The Weekly Return

1840 · Weekly Mortality Returns · Work 687 of 1,871

The Weekly Return, 1840, Weekly Mortality Returns

A long row of uniform bound volumes of weekly mortality returns of 1840 standing on a cast-iron shelf in the store room of a government register office in London, each volume an octavo twenty-five centimetres tall in dark cloth with a dark leather spine, the spines showing only faint dull gilt lines, the row about one metre long, the first years of the series, at the end of the row a stack of thin unbound weekly issues of pale paper, lying under a glass paperweight, a messenger seen from behind in a dark frock coat laying the newest issue on top of the stack, a gas flame on the left and cool daylight from a tall window on the river side.

What it was used for
The Weekly Return was the official weekly bulletin of births and deaths in London, issued by the General Register Office. London's registrars reported weekly from 1840; the first issue appeared for the week ending 11 January 1840. It was compiled in the statistical department under William Farr with his clerks, and it appeared within days: the issue of 12 August 1854 was summarised in The Times by 17 August. It recorded deaths by sub-district and by cause; cholera appeared as a separate item from 8 January 1842 until 28 December 1901, when London's last cholera death was reported. John Snow worked from these sheets in 1854: he counted the cholera deaths in the sixteen sub-districts supplied by two water companies.
What was new
What was new was not the weekly rhythm — the old Bills of Mortality had also appeared weekly, by cause of death — but completeness, and the difference is measurable: for 1842 the bills give 34 smallpox deaths in London, the Weekly Return 357. That is not the disease but the method — the bills counted burials in Anglican churchyards, the Return all deaths of the whole population over a larger area. The barb: what the Return lacked was the denominator. In 1854 Snow needed the number of houses each water company supplied in each sub-district. The companies' parliamentary returns gave only totals for South London for 1853, 40,046 houses for Southwark & Vauxhall and 26,107 for Lambeth, and the office had no sub-district figures.

What the sources leave open: The statements on Snow, on the denominator and on the publication interval come from a document in the John Snow Archive (Michigan State University) written as a narrated scene between Snow and Farr; the original issues were not consulted. On the start of the series the sources give two different kinds of date: first issue for the week ending 11 January 1840, cholera as a separate item from 8 January 1842.

Further reading