Census and Poor Law Union Data, 1871-1891

The paper Udny Yule read to the Royal Statistical Society at the end of the nineteenth century (Yule, 1899) was a landmark in social statistics. He applied multiple regression analysis to a question of social policy, namely reforms to the 19th century system of poverty alleviation in England. To do this, Yule created a dataset from administrative and Census data. Yule’s original dataset was not preserved, but because his data were drawn from public sources, it is possible to reconstruct it, albeit with some slight differences from the original. This report provides a description of how the dataset was reconstructed and how it varies from the one used in the 1899 paper.