Book Review: The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick-Maker: The Story Of Britain Through Its Census Since 1801 by Roger Hutchinson

The last two centuries of British life are examined via cold, hard statistics in Roger Hutchinson’s absorbing history.

What starts as a homage to the men who launched the census as the nation fought Napoleon, expands into a bite-size exploration of the state of the nation (and later Empire).

Hutchinson, like Bill Bryson’s non-travel works, manages to make what could be the driest of subjects come alive. He eschews high politics to focus mainly on the man and woman in the street and their daily, yearly and decennial struggle to live and thrive against the odds.

While The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick-Maker may lack some of Bryson’s warming humour, it does have the QI (Quite Interesting) factor in spades.

It burrows into the official records to present a story that is sometimes uplifting and, at others, brutally stark.