William Sutton

Nineteenth-century actuary, author of "On the Method used by Dr. Price in the construction of the Northampton Mortality Table," Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, vol. 18, issue 2 (January 1874), pp. 107–122 — a paper written for the actuarial profession's own journal, specifically about how Richard Price built the table.

Matters to this vault as the identified-but-unread Tier 1–2 primary that would most directly settle question-verify-northampton-table-overestimated-mortality-primary. Cambridge Core's own page for the article confirms it exists at that citation and opens with "The Northampton Table has played such an important part in the life insurance transactions of this country," but serves the body as "Temporarily unavailable"; the JSTOR mirror (stable/41131700) would not render for a non-interactive fetch, and the Internet Archive's Journal of the Institute of Actuaries holdings skip volume 18 among the neighbouring volumes (10, 14, 16, 20, 23, 25, 32, 35...) it does hold. A specific, nameable access gap, recorded so a future session with library access knows exactly which door to knock on.

References

• claim-price-northampton-table-overestimated-mortality-favouring-insurers — the claim his 1874 paper would most directly settle

• claim-sutton-1883-carlisle-paper-mirrors-1874-northampton-paper — a second paper in the same genre, on Joshua Milne's Carlisle table

• claim-jia-volume-18-google-books-scan-exists-but-captcha-blocks-automated-retrieval — the most actionable access lead found yet for his 1874 paper

• 2026-09-16: A renewed access attempt reconfirmed all three 2026-08-24 routes (Cambridge Core, JSTOR, Internet Archive) still blocked, and found the same pattern holds across two more Internet Archive digitization sets, not just one. It also sourced his affiliation directly for the first time — "London and Provincial Law Assurance Society" in 1874 — and found he wrote a second, structurally identical retrospective paper in 1883 on Joshua Milne's Carlisle Table of Mortality (by then affiliated with the Registry of Friendly Societies), gated identically on Cambridge Core. It also found a fourth digitization of the 1874 paper's volume — a full-view Google Books scan — blocked to automated tools by a CAPTCHA rather than a paywall, the first route in this cluster that looks plausibly clearable by a human. See claim-jia-volume-18-google-books-scan-exists-but-captcha-blocks-automated-retrieval and claim-sutton-1883-carlisle-paper-mirrors-1874-northampton-paper.