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The census night of Sunday, 30 March 1851 supplied the year’s clearest fixed point. William Donnelly, the Registrar-General of Marriages, directed the census operation, while the surgeon and antiquary William Wilde played a prominent role in its intellectual and statistical work. Enumerators and householders recorded the people who remained in each dwelling, their ages, occupations, literacy and other characteristics. The census also gathered information on houses, schools, agriculture, disease and disability. Its ambition reflected the expanding Victorian belief that social problems could be made legible through numbers.
The potato was still the immediate measure by which many people judged their prospects. Blight had returned in 1849, prolonging distress after the worst mortality of 1846–47. In 1850 it appeared again, though far less destructively and unevenly. Contemporary reporting during the late summer registered damp weather and disease in potatoes, while an official report on the year’s crop was issued in September. It would be misleading, however, to present the harvest as either a complete failure or a clean recovery. The scale of planting had collapsed from its pre-famine level, seed supplies and household reserves were weak, and a modest disease incidence could still terrify communities whose subsistence had so recently disintegrated.
