The Great Majority
The Public Domain Review's essay on body snatching takes its title from Edward Young's play The Revenge (1721): "Death joins us to the great majority". The phrase, it says, became a euphemism "for the brute fact that the dead far outnumbered the living". How far, and when? The Population Reference Bureau's estimate of everyone ever born gives an answer for any year.
Between PRB's benchmark years I let the population grow at a steady rate and spread the births in proportion, which is how PRB fills its gaps too. The dead are everyone ever born minus everyone alive. Each dot is one person; the red one is alive.
What the numbers show
The majority was never greater, relative to the living, than in the centuries before Young wrote. In 1650, PRB's figures give about 188 dead for every living person. By 1721 it was near 140, by 1880 near 68, and in 2022 it is 13.7. The dead have only grown, to about 109 billion, but the living have grown faster: one person in fifteen of everyone ever born is alive now. On PRB's projection that becomes one in twelve by 2050.
Checks
| Claim | Check |
|---|---|
| Young's line, 1721 | Wikipedia, Edward Young: The Revenge, 1721 |
| PRB's running total of births | Each "number ever born" equals the one before plus the births between benchmarks, in every row; I added them up |
| PRB: "nearly 7%" of everyone ever born is alive | 7,963,500,000 ÷ 117,020,448,575 = 6.8% |
What stands on what
| Item | Source |
|---|---|
| Benchmarks, populations, births | Population Reference Bureau, "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?" (2022), table of benchmark years. They call it "part science and part art"; it starts from two people in 190,000 BCE. |
| Interpolation, ratios, the dots | My arithmetic, in the page's script |
| The essay | Roger Luckhurst, "The Great Majority: Body Snatching and Burial Reform in 19th-Century Britain", The Public Domain Review, 2 April 2026 |