ABSTRACT
Frances Ferguson points out in Solitude and the Sublime, the encounter between the man and the little girl in Wordsworth's 'We Are Seven' dramatizes the pitfalls of the ostensive nature of counting. In place of name and number we have location, occupation, age, and myriad other categories that serve to reindividuate the part of the whole and render it readable only through the relationships established by those categories. The primary opposition to the census focused on its cost, impracticality, and pointlessness. Matthew Ridley spoke of the people's 'superstitious' fear of a census arising out of the biblical injunction against attempting to count the people. The census is seen as the harbinger of an 'engine of rapacity and oppression', the first mechanism of increasing state control. The increased scale virtually eliminates the gypsies, and the extent of this increased scale, which Coleridge termed bombast, merely points up the danger and the subsequent need for containment occasioned by this experience.
