The first official census of Great Britain was carried out in England, Scotland and Wales in 1801. It counted population, occupations and inhabited houses amid concern about war, food supplies and demographic growth. Regular censuses thereafter made society increasingly measurable through statistics.

Population statistics helped shape nineteenth-century debates about poverty, cities, labour and social reform. These conditions informed the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and later Victorian writers concerned with anonymous urban masses.