Which date is correct for Price's completion of the Northampton mortality table — 1769 (Walford 1885), 1771 (first edition of Observations on Reversionary Payments), or 1783 (fourth edition, per a secondary web source)?
claim-walford-three-period-taxonomy-places-amicable-in-speculative-era quotes Cornelius Walford's 1885 essay dating "the accomplishment of this last result by Dr. Price" — the Northampton table — to 1769. The vault's existing claim-price-northampton-table-standard-actuarial-reference-century dates the publication of Observations on Reversionary Payments to 1771. A source located via web search during the 2026-09-23 capture that produced the Walford claim states the Northampton table itself first appeared in that book's fourth edition (1783).
It is not established whether these are three descriptions of one milestone (with Walford, the vault, or the web source simply wrong about the date), or three genuinely distinct milestones — compiling the underlying Northampton parish-register data, publishing the book's first edition, and the table's first printed appearance in a later edition — that later tellings have collapsed into a single date.
What would answer this: a direct read of the 1771 first edition of Observations on Reversionary Payments (does it already contain the Northampton table, or is Price working from other data at that point?) against the 1783 fourth edition, to establish when the table itself first appeared in Price's own publication history. Geoffrey Clark's Betting on Lives (1999) — flagged repeatedly in this vault's actuarial-history captures as unread — would plausibly settle the bibliographic history directly and is the natural first check before hunting down period editions independently.
Why it matters: the date sits inside a load-bearing historiographical claim (Walford's own periodization, crediting Price by name and year with ending the "Speculative or Transitional Period" of English life assurance) and inside the vault's standing claim about the Northampton table's century-long authority. A three-way date conflict left unreconciled risks quietly hardening into whichever number a later note happens to quote first.
Linked from claim-walford-three-period-taxonomy-places-amicable-in-speculative-era and entity-richard-price.
- 2026-09-24: Progress: primary reads show a Northampton table in print in the 1771 first edition (Appendix Table IV, data to 1770) and a re-formed one in the 1783 fourth edition (1735-1780). So 1771 and 1783 are two states of the table, and 1769 is unsupported by the data window. Left open because Walford's own 1769 sentence was not re-read and the 1771 and 1783 numbers were not compared. See claim-price-1771-first-edition-prints-northampton-table-as-appendix-table-iv, claim-price-northampton-data-run-to-1770-so-1769-completion-date-unsupported, claim-price-1783-fourth-edition-reforms-northampton-table-on-1735-1780-data.