ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Using Counts in Context: The Bills of Mortality and Lived Experience

• In Event: Disciplinary Perspectives on the London Bills of Mortality, 1518–1858

English Abstract

We like to think that quantification makes matters more objective. But beyond any set of numbers lurk the twin questions of what those numbers measure and their significance to the people who use them. This talk will focus on residents of the City of London, who could directly compare the Bills’ counts with their own recent, lived experience, thus tempering their trust in the Bills as well as sharpening and expanding their sense of local conditions and events.
London’s mortality counts were compiled for government use. Once those counts were published, however, others were free to use them as they pleased. The plague broadsides of the 1590s were presumably intended to help individuals make wiser plans during epidemics, when there could be too little civic infrastructure to control public behavior. Yet consulting the counts was rarely an individual endeavor. Groups gathered to look at a broadside could digest the data together before making their individual decisions, with input – accurate or not – from the more numerate and sophisticated. The handbills of the 17th and 18th centuries were typically purchased by individuals, but they were often brought along on social visits and to coffeeshops to be consulted in company. While John Graunt famously complained in his groundbreaking Natural and Political Observations on the Bills of Mortality (1662 et seq.) that his contemporaries used the Bills only for small talk, his point was polemical. He intended his new, more rigorous analytical methods to set a much higher standard.

Those outside London encountered the data of the handbills – and Graunt’s reasoning – from a fundamentally different epistemic position. As Graunt demonstrated, many conditions in London were profoundly unlike those in any other location, whether in Britain or on the Continent. Careful comparisons with one’s lived experience might show such readers how London differed; but they could not achieve the same kind of direct, empirical engagement.

Author

• Kristin Heitman, Independent Scholar