[BITList] Fwd: Life, labour, and London

Sun Dec 11 04:11:18 GMT 2016

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Booth,  Charles  (1840-1916), shipowner and social investigator, was born on 30 March 1840 at 27 Bedford North Street, Liverpool. He was the third son of Charles Booth (1799-1860), a prosperous corn merchant, and his first wife, Emily Fletcher (1803-1853). Both his parents were Unitarians, and had wide connections among the commercial, dissenting, and philanthropic 'aristocracy' of Liverpool (the Gurneys, Holts, Pilkingtons, Cromptons, and many others). Booth received his education at Liverpool's Royal Institution School (1850-56), where he distinguished himself only at arithmetic. This arithmetical bent persuaded his father that, rather than proceeding to university, he 'had better go into business', so at sixteen Charles was apprenticed to the shipping firm of Lamport and Holt, where he was given 'a sound business training'  (Norman-Butler, 31-2). Six years later he set up a partnership with his eldest brother, Alfred Booth, from which evolved the Booth Steamship Company, which specialized in commerce with Latin America.

Nevertheless, in both temperament and intellectual interests Charles Booth was in many ways unusual among the late Victorian business community. Of strikingly handsome physical appearance, he was prone throughout his adult life to chronic ill health, nervous depression, and undiagnosed digestive maladies that forced him to take long periods of rest and foreign travel. He had a strong though undeveloped artistic bent that found expression in sketching, painting in watercolours, composing dramatic sketches, and an admiration for John Ruskin. He was deeply interested in current religious and philosophical debates, although lack of serious intellectual training and a curious inability to absorb ideas from books meant that his grasp of such issues was often eclectic and derivative. The controversy that followed the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859 left him feeling that although 'he would dearly have loved to go on believing in the Almighty he had been brought up to revere ... science had as clearly disproved His existence as Galileo had demonstrated the correct solar system'  (Norman-Butler, 36). He expressed similar disenchantment about the philanthropic traditions of the Liverpool bourgeoisie, dismissing them as 'the useless shell of an old world society'  (Simey and Simey, 37). Although as a young man he shared many of the beliefs of radical Liberalism, the experience of electioneering in Toxteth in the 1860s left him with a lifelong distaste for organized democratic politics.

An alternative to this religious and political vacuum that presented itself to many confused intellectuals in the 1860s and 1870s was August Comte's 'Religion of Humanity'. Several of Booth's kinsfolk (Albert Crompton, Henry Crompton, and Ernest Beesly) were active members of the positivist movement, and although Booth himself felt unable to join the organized 'Church of Humanity', the philosophy of positivism was to have a lifelong impact upon his beliefs. He became convinced that the clue to intellectual truth and human betterment lay not in theology but in a new 'scientific' understanding of both the natural world and human and social relationships. 'No compromise is possible between the old world and the new,' he wrote in 1870. 'Science must lay down afresh the laws of life ... I feel assured that the principles of Positivism will lead us on till we find the true solution of the problem of government'  (Simey and Simey, 48-9).

Booth's rejection of Liverpool nonconformity led to some degree of estrangement from other members of the Booth family-an estrangement reinforced by his marriage on 29 April 1871 to Mary Catherine Macaulay (1847-1939) [see Booth,  Mary Catherine], daughter of Charles Zachary Macaulay, a senior Whitehall official, and niece of Lord Macaulay. Mary was renowned as one of the cleverest and most widely read women of her day, and the marriage brought Booth into the orbit of a cosmopolitan intellectual aristocracy quite different in outlook from the business classes of Liverpool. Whether the pressures of such a marriage reinforced or assuaged Booth's depressive streak must be a matter of speculation; but certainly pressure from Mary encouraged him to engage in some form of intellectual challenge other than the running of a family business.

Precisely why Booth came to focus upon analysis of the condition of the London poor remains unclear, but such a subject brought together many of his earlier talents and interests-his arithmetical skills, his discontent with philanthropy, his hopes of developing a more 'scientific' approach to the study of society, his strong sense of personal and civic duty. His concern was also stimulated by the deep-seated social crisis of the 1880s. Most historians now reject the view that Booth embarked on his survey specifically to correct the exaggerated estimates of urban poverty advanced by H. M. Hyndman; but there can be no doubt that, both as a businessman and as a citizen, Booth was deeply perturbed by the confounding of earlier assumptions of progress. His interest in precise measurement led him to engage the services of a powerful network of young men and women, based on Toynbee Hall, the Charity Organization Society, and the Royal Statistical Society, who were dedicated to solving 'the social problem'. Many of these young investigators were themselves to become major figures in the development of social science and reformist public administration-among them Hubert Llewellyn Smith, Ernest Aves, Gerald Duckworth, David Schloss, Clara Collet, and Booth's cousin by marriage Beatrice Potter.

Booth's investigation, which began with his pilot survey of Tower Hamlets in 1887, was to last for fifteen years, and was eventually to be published in a gathered form as Life and Labour of the People in London in seventeen volumes (1902). It was based on information from a great variety of sources: interviews, questionnaires, reports from London school board visitors, house-to-house visitation. It focused upon three separate aspects of London life-poverty, industry, and religious influences. For purposes of analysis it divided the population into eight horizontal classes, ranging from class H (the upper middle class) through to class B (the casual poor) and class A (the savages and criminals). Its most famous finding was that approximately one third of the inhabitants of London were living in some degree of poverty; poverty caused partly by drink, but far more extensively by structural factors such as industrial depression, competition, and low wages. The industry volumes focused upon the problem of casual labour, and suggested that a great deal of urban distress was linked to chronic disorganization in the market for labour. The religious volumes came to no very clear conclusion, but uncovered an extraordinary patchwork of teeming religious pluralism, ranging from Roman Catholicism and high Anglicanism to extreme evangelical protestantism, from exaggerated enthusiasm and piety to indifference and irreverence, from monotheistic 'orthodoxy' through to an immense variety of idiosyncratic cults.

The significance of Booth's survey was hotly debated at the time, and continues to be so a century later. Some have claimed him as one of the founding fathers of sociology or of empirical social science, whereas others have suggested that, despite its huge accumulation of facts, the survey had little or no explanatory validity. Some have portrayed Booth's poverty findings as a crucial influence on the growth of the welfare state; whereas others have concluded that Booth's practical influence on social policy was negligible. Many have regretted the lack of a historical dimension; and Booth's own manuscripts reveal that he was himself troubled about his survey's rather static quality, and by the fact that it said little about whether conditions were deteriorating or improving. Current research on Booth has moved away from this type of question, and has concentrated less upon the survey's scientific strengths and deficiencies and more on its status as a unique historical archive; as a documentary periscope into the assumptions, beliefs, and anxieties of one of the major protagonists of the late Victorian era  (O'Day and Englander, 1993; Englander and O'Day, 1995).

Booth himself, however, was ambitious to use his social inquiries to influence opinion and policy, as can be seen in his activities in a number of spheres, such as tariffs, industrial structure, and promotion of old age pensions. At all times his central concern was to defend and improve the position of the efficient, 'industrious' working class against 'unfair competition' in both foreign and domestic markets. Evidence of the adverse effect on London trades of unlimited foreign competition confirmed his view that free trade was no longer a viable policy for Britain, and led in 1903 to his active involvement in Joseph Chamberlain's campaign for tariff reform.

Likewise, at an early stage of his poverty inquiry Booth had concluded that the 'crux of the social problem' lay in the treatment of the parasitic group whom he had labelled as class B. This was the group, just above the savage outcasts of class A, who nevertheless performed no real economic or social function, but survived on the fringes of society as parasites upon the prosperity of the classes above them. This class was fostered by the structural phenomenon of casual labour, which enabled inefficient workers to eke out an occasional livelihood by undercutting the wages of the more efficient classes above them. Booth's policy solution, spelt out in a series of public inquiries from the select committees on distress from want of employment (1894-5) to the royal commission on the poor laws (1905-9), was the widespread regularization and 'decasualization' of employment, which would concentrate regular work on the efficient majority, and make it possible to apply remedial treatment to the inefficient 'residuum'. Such treatment might consist of compulsory retraining and education; or, in extremis, of permanent confinement in labour colonies sealed off from the rest of society. A similar outlook informed Booth's proposals on the poor law and old age pensions. In Booth's view, proper use of the poor law was being impeded by the fact that by far the largest pauper group were old people no longer capable of work, whom public opinion quite properly regarded as honourable and deserving. In Booth's view, if the old were removed from poor relief by payment of universal old age pensions, then the poor law could revert to its proper task of disciplining and deterring the small minority whose destitution was more or less 'voluntary'. Concerns of this kind led to his appointment to the royal commission on the poor laws in 1905, although a severe recurrence of his earlier ill health meant that Booth's membership of this great classic public inquiry was largely inactive. However, his contribution to the old age pensions movement was an important strand in the debate that led up to the first Old Age Pensions Act (as was acknowledged in an illuminated address presented to Booth by the National Committee of Organised Labour in 1909).

Throughout his life Booth's investigative and reformist interests were funded by his successful business management. He remained an active working chairman of the steamship company for more than forty years, and travelled annually to New York to develop his firm's North American connections. Despite his recurrent depressions his marriage appears to have been a happy one, producing three sons and four daughters. His fourth child, George Macaulay Booth, businessman, was a founder of the unit trust movement in Britain. Lloyd George brought him into Whitehall during the First World War to impress business methods upon public administration. Booth's public services were recognized by a long list of distinctions; he was elected president of the Royal Statistical Society (1892-4) and fellow of the Royal Society (1899), and sworn of the privy council in 1904. He was awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Liverpool. He died on 23 November 1916 at his Leicestershire country home, Gracedieu Manor, and was buried at neighbouring Thringstone. A memorial tablet designed by Sir Charles Nicholson, bt, was erected in St Paul's Cathedral in 1920.

Jose Harris 

Sources  M. Booth, Charles Booth: a memoir (1918) + B. Webb, My apprenticeship, 2 vols. (1938) + T. S. Simey and M. B. Simey, Charles Booth: social scientist (1960) + B. Norman-Butler, Victorian aspirations: the life and labour of Charles and Mary Booth (1972) + R. O'Day and D. Englander, Mr Charles Booth's inquiry: 'Life and labour of the people in London' reconsidered (1993) + D. Englander and R. O'Day, Retrieved riches: social investigation in Britain, 1840-1914 (1995) + m. cert. + R. P. T. Davenport-Hines, 'Booth, George Macaulay', DBB + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1917)
Archives BL + BLPES, corresp. relating to Royal Economic Society + BLPES, papers relating to 'Life and Labour' + LUL, corresp. and papers + Royal Statistical Society, London, MS of statistics from census returns + U. Lpool, papers relating to 'Life and Labour' | Parl. Arch., letters to Herbert Samuel
Likenesses  G. F. Watts, oils, c.1901, NPG [see illus.] · W. Rothenstein, oils, 1908, U. Lpool · W. Rothenstein, pencil drawing, 1910, NPG · C. Nicholson, tablet, St Paul's Cathedral, London
Wealth at death  £150,938 8s. 11d.: probate, 16 Feb 1917, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

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