The Legacy of Charles Booth

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Booth approached the question and cause of poverty as a consideration of practicality rather than a moralizing sentence. In this light, his Life and Labour was recognized as perhaps the most comprehensive and illuminating work of descriptive statistics which had yet appeared. Booth’s classifications were based on income and employment patterns and status rather than social classes. He identified eight classes and labelled them from A to H. To Booth, the line of poverty could be drawn around the point of a “bare income” of 18s. to 21s. per week, which separated those who could just get by and those who were in need.

Among the many who helped him to compile his material, and edit it, were his wife’s cousin, Miss Beatrice Potter (Mrs. Sidney Webb) and Sir Graham Balfour for the earlier volumes, and Ernest Aves for the latter.

Although Booth set out thinking that Hyndman’s 1885 claim that 25 percent of the population lived in conditions of extreme poverty was vastly overstated, his own research found that 33 percent of the population lived in these impoverished conditions.

While Booth was beginning his research for Life and Labour, he presented his first paper, ‘The Occupations of the People of London’, in the spring of 1886 to the Royal Statistical Society. The subsequent publication ‘‘Occupations of the People 1841-1881’ offered close to a hundred pages of tables drawn from the censuses. He sought to portray the current industrial composition of the country through census analysis. In this study, Booth assumed that all males over 20 should be considered earners rather than dependents.

In 1893, Booth delivered another lecture to the Royal Statistical Society, in which he draws on the latest census of 1891, in order to further his enquiries into the state of London’s poverty. One of the volumes present here is extensively annotated, in Booth’s own hand, with notes pertaining to the later 1902 edition of his work.

Booth was not only concerned about impoverishment but also looked into its alleviation. In 1893, he served on the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor. Alas, the commission failed to come to a unanimous conclusion and Booth signed the minority report in 1895. In 1899, Booth published ‘Old Age Pensions and the Aged Poor: A Proposal’, which set out his thoughts on state pension prevision. It would, however, take another nine years for his ideas reach the statue book, when the Liberal Party passed the Old Age Pensions Act, in 1908. Even then Booth’s re commendations were not full adopted, with pensions set to be means tested rather than universal, which not come into effect until 1946!

Although Booth had studiously avoided party politics throughout his long career, in order to maintain his impartiality, his prominence and renown as the foremost expert on social reform lead to him being appointed to the Privy Council in 1904. The Council which consists of some of the leading political, religious, and legal figures of the day, constitute the highest advisory council to the monarch. At present the council contains some 650 members.

One of Booth’s last major public roles was his appointment to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws in December 1905. He published three pamphlets while serving in this role, with the final one entitled ‘Industrial Unrest and Trade Union Policy’; in which he forwards somewhat unusual solutions to industrial relations, by the grading of employers by trade unions and workers.