Record Masterclass
Julie Goucher explains what we can learn of Victorian London from maps created by Charles Booth in his efforts to record the lives of the poor
Explore Victorian London with poverty maps
Like many enlightened figures of his time, the social reformer Charles Booth (1840–1916) was acutely concerned with the unprecedented scale of poverty in Britain’s rapidly growing Victorian cities. But this was no whim: Booth was a successful businessman, with interests in the leather and shipping industries, and to combat some of the more sensationalist reporting in the contemporary press, he applied his analytical mind to the problem.
To this end, he began an ambitious project in 1886 to survey the living and working conditions of Londoners. This phenomenal task was to take him and his investigators 17 years to complete. The resulting publication was Life and Labour of the People in London; the library of the Society of Genealogists in Clerkenwell holds a copy.
Data Collection
The survey focused on three areas: poverty, industry and religious influences. Booth began by obtaining reports from ‘School Board Visitors’, who were responsible for conducting houseto-house visits to gather detailed information about poverty levels and types of occupation among families, and record their children’s school attendance.
The industry angle investigated trades, from tailoring and woodworking to organ-grinding and chorus-line dancing, to establish wage levels and conditions of employment. About 1,000 interviews were conducted with business owners, workers and trade union officials, and a similar number of questionnaires completed by employers and workers’ representatives. The survey also gathered information on the
“unoccupied classes” and the inmates of institutions such as workhouses.
Investigators tasked with gathering information on religion interviewed 1,500 clergymen of different denominations, and a further 200 questionnaires were completed by nonconformist and Church of England officials. The inquiry also sought to identify other social and moral influences on peoples’ lives, such as policing, philanthropy and local government.
is ‘Beale Road in south Hackney identified as a “hotbed of socialists”‘
Mapping London
Perhaps the most distinctive outcome of the survey was Booth’s poverty maps of London ( booth.lse.ac.uk/map/14/0.1174/51.5064/100/00), which form part of the Charles Booth archive held by the London School of Economics Library. There
are two editions of the maps. The first, published in 1889, was based on the information gathered by the School Board Visitors. The second, comprising 12 sheets known collectively as the Map Descriptive of London Poverty 1898–9, was based on the observations of the investigators as they accompanied policemen on their beats, and published in 1902–1903.
The online archive includes the second series of the maps. In this pioneering example of social cartography, each street is coloured to indicate the income and social class of its inhabitants. Seven classes are identified ranging from the “Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal’ through “Poor. 18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family” to “Upper-middle and upper classes. Wealthy”. The maps are searchable by street, parish and area, and can be compared with modern maps of London.
Visitors to the site can also search a catalogue of notebooks, which includes detailed descriptions of individual pages containing the observations of the investigators as they walked London’s streets between 1897 and 1901. Some of the notebooks have been digitised and these are grouped into police notebooks, which contain descriptions and features of London streets, their inhabitants and the industry that took place there; Stepney Union casebooks, recording case histories of inmates of Bromley and Stepney workhouses; and Jewish notebooks, which throw light on the work and religious life of London’s Jewish community of the 1880s and 1890s.
George H Duckworth’s police notebook of 1897 (BOOTH/B/346) includes an account of smoking in an opium den in Jamaica
Street, Limehouse, kept by the Hindu cook Mr Khodonabaksch, while Beale Road in south Hackney is identified as a “hotbed of socialists”, brothels abound in Bromley’s Back Alley and rats are rife in the drains near a fat refinery in Hawgood Street. The places mentioned in the notebooks are often linked to their location on the relevant poverty map.
Methodological Flaws
While Booth’s work is a fascinating addition to our understanding of our London forebears, it wasn’t perfect. Seen through a modern lens, many of the observations are moralistic, there is a scarcity of interviews with people from the “Lowest class”, and the maps assume a social position based on location and occupation. But there’s no denying his commitment to the improvement of social conditions or his legacy – a rich and intriguing source of information for family and social historians.