The 1820s and 1830s have been poetically described by historians of statistics as decades of the ‘great explosion’, ‘deluge’ or ‘avalanche’ in numbers. Before that time, numbers had played only a very minor part, when indeed they were present at all, in political debates. As Theodore Porter wrote, statistics as a plural had not yet become standard usage: ‘That all generations previous to the 1820s managed to get by without it reveals dimly how different was the world they lived in – a world without suicide rates, unemployment figures, and intelligence quotients.’ But, from then on, the presence of numbers in public discourse would inflate steadily, as reformers concerned with social ills – crime, poverty, madness, suicide – and their more conservative opponents as well often backed their arguments with figures, sometimes striking, sometimes tedious. In this new era of statistical enthusiasm, ‘statists’ or ‘statisticians’, many of them amateurs or social reformers of various stripes, often gathered to set up private statistical societies, the prototype of which was the Manchester Statistical Society, established in 1834. At the same time, they heartily exhorted their governments to perfect and increase their own registration procedures and census activities. The prenumerate age, to be sure, was not completely devoid of figures and statistical tables. In fact, since the early seventeenth century, many European realms had collected information that could be summarized in numbers and tables through various censuses, inquiries and registries (the latter often delegated to church authorities).