Review of Reviews,  11 (1895), 569–78.

The Book of the Month. Getting Better or Worse?—The Criminal Statistics for 1893

Anon

Genre:

Regular Feature, Abstract

Publications abstracted:

Judicial Statistics, England and Wales

Relevant illustrations:

graph [5]; map [4]

Subjects:

Statistics, Crime, Popularization


    Claims that 'This blue book is the first intelligible document that has been issued by the Home Office, and the first impression which it produces is that there is nothing so deceitful as statistics, nothing so misleading as official reports, and nothing so hopelessly bewildering as the tables which heretofore have been palmed off upon the British public'. The 'statistics of vice and crime' nevertheless give 'an approximate idea as to the direction in which the nation is moving, whether progressing upwards or retrogressing downwards'. However, only 'a very small proportion of the forty millions of our population will ever have the opportunity of inspecting this imperial quarto with its elaborate maps and diagrams. Therefore—with what I hope the Home Office editors will regard as a permissible infringement on their copyright—I take the liberty of reproducing their maps [...] together with diagrams'. Notes that 'suicides alone among the incidents recorded in this volume show a continuous steady rise'. (569)



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