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Charles Booth Online
From: London School of Economics and Political Science
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| Charles Booth in 1902. | |
 n 1903, the most comprehensive inquiry into the condition of people in London was published in 17 volumes. The Life and Labour of the People in London by Charles Booth, was accompanied by Maps Descriptive of London Poverty 1898-9, which provided socially coded maps that covered virtually the whole area of London. Charles Booth (1840-1916) was one of those polymathic English Victorians who was profoundly concerned by contemporary social problems. Frustrated with the limitations of philanthropy and conditional charity in addressing the poverty which scarred British urban society, Booth devised, organised and funded this vast social survey into London life. |
The research that lay behind these published volumes is contained in notebooks made by social investigators such as Beatrice Webb (née Potter) and George Duckworth while following policemen on their beats around London. Questionnaires and interviews exploring the religious, industrial and social life of the capital were also used. The majority of this material lay untouched for the better part of a century at the British Library of Political and Economic Sciences, based at the London School of Economics and Political Science, until 1999 when the library decided to digitise this rich and under-exploited archive. |
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| The maps descriptive of London poverty. | |
In May 2001, the Charles Booth Online Archive (http://booth.lse.ac.uk) was officially launched. Caroline Shaw, project manager, curated what amounted to a digital facelift for this archive. The Maps Descriptive of London Poverty have been digitised and made searchable by street, postcode and name of resident family; the 31 police notebooks were also digitised and can be viewed alongside the maps. In addition, the project catalogue has been completely overhauled and made searchable online, so that the name of every street, person and occupation mentioned in the notebooks can be found, and every trade and occupation has been indexed. Caroline Shaw stresses that the re-indexing and the addition of search engines has "really helped to unlock the treasures held in the archive." |
Shaw adds that "in terms of academic research, the possibility of using the survey for investigations into economic, social and labour history, as well as the history of social research itself, are obvious." The survey has been used for research into purpose-built London flats before 1920, shoemaking in Spitalfields, infant mortality in Bethnal Green, and church architecture. The archive is also ideal and indeed fully intended for perusal by a wider public interested in London generally, or just their own patch of London at the end of the nineteenth century. Caroline Shaw found the police notebooks most intriguing: "It is like reading a diary belonging to place. Reading about streets and areas one is familiar with gives a frisson of tension between the closeness and distance of the past: one can picture the street, yet it is described in such an alien manner." She identifies one of her favourite parts of the archive: "The Stepney Union notebooks, which give case histories for inmates of the Stepney and Bromley workhouses, are very moving: matter-of-fact summaries of ruined lives." |
It is the inclusion of such personal insights that make the Booth archive so unique. "Booth's survey was one of several surveys into working-class life undertaken in the nineteenth century: however it is the only survey for which the original notes and data have survived." In interviews and questionnaires valuable to the social scientist and amateur researcher alike, "the voice of the original interviewees can be heard rather than simply the statistical and editorial overview of the published volumes." The Online Guide to the Papers of Charles Booth is itself unique in presenting this valuable resource to an online public. |
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