A Sort of Battlefield

Abstract

All over the country contemporaries were glad to find that, after the initial registration in 1832, ‘the work of the two following years was performed with tolerable facility and expedition. … It was pretty generally pronounced that the registration clauses of the reform act worked well upon the whole, and that both the expense and the inconvenience of the revision would proceed for some years in a diminishing ratio.’¹ The number of days occupied by the revising banisters in England and Wales fell from 3662 in 1832 to 2632 in 1833 and 2585 in 1834, and the cost to the Treasury decreased from £30,400 in 1832 to £22,520 in 1834.²