Charles Booth (social reformer)
Macaulay | |
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Awards | Guy Medal |
Charles James Booth (30 March 1840 – 23 November 1916) was a British
During the 1860s Booth became interested in the philosophy of
Booth is best known for his multi-volume book Life and Labour of the People in London (1902), which focuses on the statistics he collected regarding poverty in London. Life and Labour "discusses a range of social conditions in which it reported that it appeared people are likely to be poor or on the margins of poverty."[4] Booth is also recognised for influencing the transition of social attitudes from the Victorian Age to the 20th century.[5]
Due to his investigations on poverty, some honour Charles Booth as one of the founding fathers of social administration, and regard his work crucial when studying social policy.[4]
Early life and education
Born at
Booth became alienated from the dominant, nonconformist business class of Liverpool into which he had been born.[8]
Career
Booth's father died in 1860, bequeathing him control of the family business. He entered the skinning and leather business with his elder brother Alfred, and they set up Alfred Booth and Company establishing offices in Liverpool and New York City with a £20,000 inheritance.[6] In 1865 Booth campaigned for the Liberals in Toxteth, Liverpool, albeit unsuccessfully.[9]
After learning the shipping trade, Booth was able to persuade Alfred and his sister Emily to invest in steamships and established a service to Pará, Maranhão, and Ceará in Brazil. Then in 1866 Charles and Alfred Booth commenced the start of a shipping service between Brazil and Europe named the Booth Steamship Company.[10] Charles himself went on the first voyage to Brazil on 14 February 1866. He was also involved in the building of a harbor at Manaus which overcame seasonal fluctuations in water levels. Booth described this as his "monument" (to shipping) when he visited Manaus for the last time in 1912.[11] Booth would write letters to his wife describing the business problems that would rise such as personnel management, decision making, and factory relocation; this laid a foundation for the fundamentals of business ethics. Booth Shipping Line's biggest rival was R. Singlehurst and Company, but Booth kept calm while managing business affairs.[6]
Booth initially engaged in politics, canvassing unsuccessfully for the Liberal Party in the General Election of 1865. Following the Conservative Party victory in municipal elections in 1866, his interest in active politics waned. This result changed Booth's attitude, when he concluded that he could contribute more by commissioning social studies, rather than by being a representative in Parliament.[6]
Social research
In 1886, influenced earlier by positivism, Booth embarked on his major survey of London life and labour conditions for which he became famous and commonly regarded as initiating the systematic study of poverty in Britain.[8] Booth was critical of the existing statistical data on poverty. By analyzing census returns he argued that they were unsatisfactory, later being invited to sit on a parliamentary committee in 1891 which suggested improvements that could be made to them.[6] Due to the scale of the survey, results were published serially but it took over fifteen years before the full seventeen volume edition was published. His work on the study and his concern with the problems of poverty led to an involvement in campaigning for old-age pensions and promoting the decasualisation of labour.[8]
Booth publicly criticised the claims of
After the first two volumes were published Booth expanded his research. This investigation was carried out by Booth himself with his team of researchers. Nonetheless, Booth continued to oversee his successful shipping business which funded his philanthropic work. The fruit of this research was a second expanded edition of his original work, published as Life and Labour of the People in London in nine volumes between 1892 and 1897. A third edition (now expanded to seventeen volumes) appeared in 1902–3.[15]
Booth used his work to argue for the introduction of Old Age Pensions which he described as "limited socialism". Booth suggested that such reforms would help prevent a socialist revolution from occurring in Britain. Booth was far from tempted by the ideals of socialism, but had sympathy with the working classes and, as part of his investigations, he took lodgings with working-class families and recorded his thoughts and findings in his diaries.[16]
London poverty maps
From 1886 to 1903, while Charles Booth was conducting his landmark survey on the life and labour of London's poorest inhabitants he created poverty maps to illustrate the conditions of the lives of these people.[17] Booth's maps were based on observations of differences in lifestyle and focused on qualitative factors: food, clothing, shelter, and relative deprivation.[18] Booth and his team of researchers visited every street in London to assess each household's class. The household's class was determined by the letters A–H, with A–D constituting want, and E-H representing comfort. Booth's maps colour-coded every street to determine and demonstrate the level of poverty or comfort. The colour-coding was also used to highlight the social conditions of the households on the streets. The objective was to expose to Victorian society the social evil, which is the problem of poverty. The maps have a strong impact on the poverty debate. Many who analyzed the maps noted how there existed greater concentrations of poverty south of the Thames, compared to the East End Slums. The colour palette of the maps also played a large role in how poverty was viewed. Areas with high concentrations of poverty were given dense and dark colours, while areas that were considered comfortable were given bright colours such as pink, blue, and red. The maps were attempting to demonstrate that the issue of poverty was a manageable problem.[19] The importance of Booth's work in social statistics was recognised by the Royal Statistical Society when in 1892 he was elected President and was awarded its first Guy Medal in Gold. In 1899 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
For the purposes of poverty measurement, Booth divided the working population into eight classes, from the poorest to the best off, labeled A–H. These categories summarised economic circumstances but also had a moral dimension, with "A" representing the "feckless, deviant or criminal" groups.[20]
"Religious Influences" series
During 1897, Charles Booth had spent a significant amount of money and a decade of his life studying the life conditions of the poor of late
Politics
Booth
In 1904, Booth was sworn of the Privy Council.[23]
Although his attitudes towards poverty might make him seem fairly Left-wing, Booth became more conservative in his views in later life. While some of his investigators, such as
Later life
Booth purchased William Holman Hunt's painting The Light of The World, which he donated to the Dean and Chapter of St Paul's in 1908.[25]
Early in 1912 Booth stood down as chairman of Alfred Booth and Company in favour of his nephew Alfred Allen Booth but in 1915 returned willingly to work under wartime exigencies despite growing evidence of heart disease.
Personal life and death
On 19 April 1871, Charles Booth married Mary Macaulay, and the couple settled in London.
Charles and Mary Booth had 7 children, 3 sons, and 4 daughters. His eldest daughter Antonia married
In 1886, the Booth family moved to Grace Dieu Manor near Thringstone, Leicestershire, and this is where Charles retired to.[27] Before he died he hosted many family gatherings in order to be surrounded by his friends, children and grandchildren.[6] He died on 23 November 1916 of a stroke and was buried in Saint Andrew's churchyard. A memorial dedicated to him stands on Thringstone village green, and a blue plaque has been erected on his house in South Kensington: 6 Grenville Place.[28]
Impact and legacy
Life and Labour of the People in London can be seen as one of the founding texts of British sociology, drawing on both
Booth's poverty maps revealed that there is a spatial component to poverty as well as an environmental context of poverty. Before his maps, environmental explanations of poverty mainly interested health professionals; Booth brought environmental issues into an empirical sociological investigation.[20][31]
In addition to Booth's influence on the field of sociology, he influenced other academics as well.
Booth's work served as an impetus for Seebohm Rowntree (1871 – 1954); he also influenced Beatrice Webb (1858 – 1943) and Helen Bosanquet (1860 – 1925).[33]
The University of Liverpool appoints academics to the Charles Booth Chair of Social Sciences and has a collection of his manuscripts and typescript.[34]
The London School of Economics keeps his work on an online searchable database, planned to include Booth's unpublished notebooks, recommended by participants in [35] a 2021 BBC Radio broadcast on his work as vivid narratives of Booth's methods and personal response to his discoveries, but omitted from his formal publications.[36]
Criticisms
The London poverty maps survey has been negatively criticised for its methodology:
According to Professor Paul Spicker in 1990
Booth used school board visitors—those who undertook to ensure the attendance of children at school—to collect information on the circumstances of families. However, his extrapolation from these findings to families without school-age children was speculative. Moreover, his "definitions" of the
Booth's 1902 study included
In 2006, Booth also received criticism for his London Poverty Maps, showing in dark and opaque colours the houses and streets where poor people lived. The palette made the areas appear as cancer or a disease to be eradicated, creating a negative connotation for that community. Nevertheless, the scaling of the map made it appear that fixing the problem would be manageable.[19]
Booth is often compared to Seebohm Rowntree due to their concepts on poverty. Even though Rowntree's work draws upon Booth's investigation, many writers on poverty generally turn their attention towards Rowntree's, because his concept clearly addressed the problem of defining a
Selected works
- Life and Labour of the People, 1st ed., Vol. I. (1889).
- Labour and Life of the People, 1st ed., Vol II. (1891).
- Life and Labour of the People in London, 2nd ed., (1892–97); 9 vols.
- Life and Labour of the People in London, 3rd ed., (1902–03); 17 vols.
See also
References
Notes
- ^ The reversal of the words in the title of the second volume was due to the original title "Life and Labour" being claimed by Samuel Smiles who wrote a similarly titled book in 1887
Citations
- ^ Wilson 2018.
- ^ "Charles Booth". Spartacus Educational. Retrieved 3 March 2021.
- ^ Abbott 1917, pp. 195–200.
- ^ a b c Spicker 1990.
- ^ Marshall, Simey & Simey 1961, p. 421.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i "Who was Charles Booth?". Charles Booth's London. London School of Economics. Retrieved 5 January 2018.
- ^ Scott 2007, pp. 14–15.
- ^ a b c d e Scott 2007, p. 15.
- ^ Caves 2005, p. 31.
- ^ "Charles Booth, British sociologist". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 25 February 2021.
- ^ Norman-Butler 1972, p. 177.
- ^ Fried & Elman 2017, p. xxviii.
- ^ Gillie 1996, pp. 715–730.
- ^ Boyle 2014, p. 116.
- ^ Fried & Elman 2017, p. 341.
- ^ "Booth, Charles (1840-1916), shipowner and social investigator". discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk. The National Archives.
- ^ Anon. 2020.
- ^ Fearon 2002.
- ^ a b Kimball 2006, pp. 353–381.
- ^ a b c Scott 2007, p. 16.
- ^ Brydon 2006, pp. 489–518.
- ^ Freeden 2010, p. 15.
- ^ www.britannica.com
- ^ "The Victorian City (HI371)". warwick.ac.uk.
- ^ "The Light of the World - St Paul's Cathedral". Stpauls.co.uk. Retrieved 5 January 2018.
- ^ www.burkespeerage.com
- ^ Booth, Mary (1918). Charles Booth, a Memoir. London: MacMillan. p. 173.
- ^ Plaque #514 on Open Plaques
- ^ Deegan 1988, pp. 301–311.
- ^ "UK Data Service › Study". beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk.
- ^ Bales 1994.
- ^ Abernethy 2013.
- ^ Scott 2007, pp. 16–17.
- ^ Fitton, Joanne (nd). "Library: Special Collections & Archives: Charles Booth Papers". libguides.liverpool.ac.uk. Retrieved 25 January 2024.
- ^ Melvyn Bragg (10 June 2021). "In Our Time, Booth's Life and Labour Survey". BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 25 January 2024.
- ^ "Booth Poverty Map & Modern map (Charles Booth's London)". LSE. Retrieved 5 January 2017.
- ^ "Paul Spicker | UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab".
- ^ Spicker 1990, pp. 21–38.
- ^ Feldman 1994, p. 166.
Sources
- Abbott, Edith (1917). "Charles Booth, 1840-1916". Journal of Political Economy. 25 (2): 195–200. S2CID 153349062.
- Anon. (January 2020). "Charles Booth's London Poverty Maps: A new book brings vivid life to the ground-breaking survey of Victorian urban living". Geographical. 92 (1). Gale A618950279.
- Abernethy, Simon (October 2013). "Deceptive data? The New Survey of London Life and Labour 1928 – 31" (PDF). Cambridge Working Papers in Economic and Social History (16). Archived from the original (PDF) on 20 July 2020. Retrieved 20 July 2020.
- Bales, Kevin (1994). Early innovations in social research: the Poverty Survey of Charles Booth (PDF) (PhD). London School of Economics. Retrieved 9 October 2019.
- Boyle, David (2014). The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can't Make Us Happy. HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 978-0-00-737289-8.
- Brydon, Thomas R. C. (2006). "Charles Booth, Charity Control, and the London Churches, 1897–1903". The Historian. 68 (3): 489–518. S2CID 145609002.
- Caves, Roger W. (2005). Encyclopedia of the City. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-415-25225-6.
- Deegan, Mary Jo (1988). "W.E.B. Du Bois and the women of hull-house, 1895–1899". The American Sociologist. 19 (4): 301–311. S2CID 145330710.
- Fearon, David (2002). "Charles Booth, Mapping London's Poverty, 1885–1903. CSISS Classics".
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(help) - Feldman, David (1994). Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840-1914. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-05501-6.
- Freeden, Michael (Summer 2010). "The Liberal Party and the New Liberalism" (PDF). Journal of Liberal History (67).
- Fried, Albert; Elman, Richard M. (2017). Routledge Revivals: Charles Booth's London (1969): A Portrait of the Poor at the Turn of the Century, Drawn from His "Life and Labour of the People in London". Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-351-98157-6.
- Gillie, Alan (1996). "The Origin of the Poverty Line". .
- Kimball, Miles A. (October 2006). "London through Rose-Colored Graphics: Visual Rhetoric and Information Graphic Design in Charles Booth's Maps of London Poverty". Journal of Technical Writing and Communication. 36 (4): 353–381. S2CID 145634256.
- Marshall, T. H.; Simey, T. S.; Simey, M. B. (June 1961). "Charles Booth, Social Scientist". The Economic Journal. 71 (282): 421. JSTOR 2228788.
- Norman-Butler, Belinda (1972). Victorian Aspirations. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 9780049230590.
- Scott, John (2007). Fifty Key Sociologists: The Formative Theorists. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-26218-2.
- Spicker, Paul (May 1990). "Charles Booth: the examination of poverty". Social Policy & Administration. 24 (1): 21–38. hdl:10059/881.
- Wilson, Matthew (2018). Moralising Space. Routledge research in planning and urban design. New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-315-44912-8.
External links
- Charles Booth's London: Poverty maps and police notebooks, LSE
- Works by or about Charles Booth at Internet Archive
- Charles Booth Papers at Senate House Library, University of London
- Spartacus description of Booth's life
- Charles Booth and poverty mapping in late nineteenth century London, Middlesex University Business School
Further reading
- Jacob Riis – wrote about the conditions of the poor and working classes on the other side of the Atlantic