ABSTRACT
Rickman made two estimates of the course of population in the eighteenth century. The first appeared in the Observations on the Results of the Population Act, 41 Geo. III, while the second was published posthumously in the preface to the Enumeration Abstract of the 1841 Census. He assumed that, between 1821 and 1831, any emigration from Great Britain would have been counterbalanced by immigration from Ireland and that the increase in the population of England and Wales-amounting to 1,978,312 persons-could be accounted for entirely by natural increase. For each type-population he had computed the implicit birth and death rates and the ratios between the sizes of various age groups. In producing his estimates for the first half of the nineteenth century, Brownlee at least had as a check the results of successive censuses, which provided the basic populations and placed some limit on the margin of error in the calculation of births and deaths.
