In Our Time - Booth's Life and Labour Survey

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Charles Booth's survey, The Life and Labour of the People in London, published in 17 volumes from 1889 to 1903. Booth (1840-1916), a Liverpudlian shipping line owner, surveyed every household in London to see if it was true, as claimed, that as many as a quarter lived in poverty. He found that it was closer to a third, and that many of these were either children with no means of support or older people no longer well enough to work. He went on to campaign for an old age pension, and broadened the impact of his findings by publishing enhanced Ordnance Survey maps with the streets coloured according to the wealth of those who lived there.The image above is of an organ grinder on a London street, circa 1893, with children dancing to the Pas de QuatreWithEmma Griffin Professor of Modern British History at the University of East AngliaSarah Wise Adjunct Professor at the University of CaliforniaAndLawrence Goldman Emeritus Fellow in History at St Peter’s College, University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, in 1886, Charles Booth surveyed every household in booming London to test an unlikely claim that as many as a quarter lived in poverty. That figure turned out to be wrong.

It was really a third, many of them too old or two. young to work. He shared this in his groundbreaking work, life and labour of the people in London, in 17 volumes, and he reinforced his findings with maps, the streets coloured according to the wealth of those who lived there, highlighting a problem that could not be ignored. With me to discuss Booth's Life and Labour Survey are Emma Griffin, Professor of Modern British History at the University of East Anglia, Sarah Wise, adjunct professor at the University of California,

and Lawrence Goldman, Emeritus Fellow in History. at St. Peter's College University of Oxford. Ron Scolman, who was Charles Booth and what was his background? Well, Charles Booth was born in 1840 in Liverpool, and he was the son of a corn merchant, that's to say, a dealer in grains and foodstuffs. And the family he came from were moderately prosperous. Now, they were Unitarians,

and Unitarianism was a form of high-minded, rationalistic Christianity, which, of course, rejected the trussurember. Trinity in favour of the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And these Unitarians were leading figures in the commercial and cultural life during this period. And Booth grew up associated with a number of these Unitarian families. Do we know why Unitarians are associated with business in that way? Oh, there's this kind of relationship between nonconformity and the need to prove oneself in a commercial arena, largely because as non-conformists, the conventional routes through education into the professions

and into public life were often closed to people who were not Anglicans in the 18th and 19th centuries. And so there was a tendency for non-conformists outside the Anglican Church to involve themselves in commerce, business, manufacturing and so forth. And science. And this is certainly the science too, absolutely. And this is certainly the case in Liverpool. But it's worth saying this, that actually Booth rejected his Unitarian faith, in fact, all faiths in his teenage years, though he remained very interested in religion for the rest of his life. He was educated locally at the Liverpool Institution School, which he left at 16, and he didn't go on to university.

So he wasn't born into the elite, nor was he educated for the elite. In fact, he was apprenticed. to a shipping firm, a shipping business in Liverpool, and then branched out with one of his brothers and developed two interlocking businesses, which dominated the rest of his life. The first was in the leather trade. They shipped animal skins across the Atlantic to New York and to a factory in New Jersey,

where the leather was tanned and made into goods. And the second, obviously related to it, was a transatlantic shipping line, eventually called the Booth Steamship Company, which grew and prospered. And it also opened up links with Brazil, taking and carrying goods from and to Brazil, and built a harbour at a small town called Manouse, which now, of course, is a great city on the Amazon River and the entry point to Amazonia. Can we get a sense of it? Sorry, half to you.

Crucially, he married, and he married very well and very interestingly in 1871. He married a woman called Mary McCauley, who was the niece of the great Victorian historian Thomas Babington McCauley. And the marriage did two things. It linked him through Mary to a range of families and another world of a metropolitan elite. And that changed his perspective and it drew him to London. But also he married an intellectual equal. It was a very close marriage. But behind the scenes, Mary took a very large role in all his work, business and the inquiry into London.

They discussed everything together. She edited his prose. At times you can almost hear Mary's voice in the text as well as Charles is. Can we get an idea of his political values at this time? Yes, we can. He was a very political young man and that continued. But as a young man, he was a radical liberal in the 1860s when he was still based in Liverpool, and Booth was very interested in the cause of secular national elementary education,

which was a radical cause in the 1860s and a liberal supporter, really, of Joseph Chamberlain, who himself was then a liberal. However, by the late 1870s, he was a supporter of Disraeli, conservative prime minister, and he continued to be a conservative, in fact. Emma, Emma, Booth wasn't the first one to be interested in London's living conditions. Can you tell us about one of his predecessors, Mayhew? Yes, absolutely. I mean, there are really a number of predecessors to Charles Booth's work,

and Mayhew is one kind of very significant writer before him writing in the 1850s. Mayhew was a journalist, and rather like Booth, he thought that if you gathered lots and lots of data and lots of information, you would maybe be able to understand the workings of society. So although he's got this journalistic background, Henry Mayhew, he spends a lot of time interviewing workers and people living in the slums, just ordinary workers as well, transcribing these interviews and sharing them through his newspaper columns.

So there's a kind of a clear journalistic origin story to the work that Booth is doing. But there've also been a whole range of other social surveys that have been done that's worth pointing out. and this tradition of social elites going and knocking on the doors of their poorer neighbours and asking who lives in the household and how much money is being brought into the household, what the household income is, and how it's being spent. Social elites have been doing this for about a century by the time that Charles Booth does his survey. And there's really this tradition that's been growing from much smaller origins

and this work has been done on a much smaller scale before Booth comes along. but there is a kind of an established tradition. Why do you think that is, Emma? I think all through, I mean, really from the late 18th century, and as we come through the 19th century, society is becoming just much more complicated and much more complex and much more difficult to understand. So if we go back to the beginning,

at the very beginning of the 19th century, most people are living in small communities that are really no larger than today's typical university, or in fact, very often smaller than today's university. So people are living, even those living in towns, if you're not living in London, you're living in a town where you might visually recognise most of the other inhabitants of that town. So that has changed phenomenally all through the 19th century that is changing.

Society is becoming much more complex, much more difficult to understand, you're much less likely to understand your neighbours. So we have this kind of emergence of new traditions of understanding and the growth of political economy and statistics and information gathering. These are all kind of developing during the 19th century. We can see Booth very much as that tradition at the very end of the century. Why, in your opinion, did Booth undertake this survey? One of the two or three main ones?

I think there are factors that are personal to him. So it's clear, as Lawrence was describing, he's part of this. He's very, very interested in the workings of society. He's very interested politically. He has a large family network and a large network of friends, connections that he's made through his marriage. all this larger society and community that is interested in the problem of poverty and interested in trying to develop solutions to that problem of poverty.

So I think there's these kind of personal reasons for Booth himself to be involved. But as I say, I think he's also part of a broader movement and a broader set of developments that has been occurring all through the Victorian period whereby people are trying to not only research social problems, but trying to do so in more rigorous ways and to try and draw on the social survey and on statistics in order to understand the world that's around them. Sarah, how did he set about, how did Booth set about what he wanted to do?

Well, Booth was very impatient and unhappy with the level of information that was coming in with the 1881 census. He thought, given this brilliant opportunity to ask interesting questions about how people live, why are the census authorities not doing this? And in 1884, he was asked, as a member of the Royal Statistical Society, to undertake a survey looking at the 1881 census to see whether it could be tied up with the Mansion House Committee,

their own findings on poverty in London, with regard to charitable giving. He decides to look at all the censuses from 1801, and to see whether there's any kind of meaningful demographic trends that he can spot in terms of occupations and earnings, people having to turn to welfare. And he finds that there isn't. And so what he thinks is, well, number one, can I get involved in designing the next census in 1891? But more than that, can I take this little survey that I've done further? And so his brainwave was to use the amazing.

amazing amounts of very rich data that had come into the London School Board. The London School Board was set up in 1870. That's the year in which primary education became compulsory for children. And so the London School Board initially charged a fee for children to go to school. If you couldn't afford that fee of one or two pence a week, you were entitled to claim that money back. But you could only do. so if you came forward to the London School Board visitors and said, you explain to them what your job was, what your earnings were, how many rooms you lived in, what that rent was, whether your wife worked, how many children you had and whether they also earned. And so he hit upon the fact that this is the kind of data that the census isn't giving us. And so what he did to get going in the April of 1886 was he interviewed 66, London School. school board visitors. So those are the people who literally knocked on every door in the small area that had been given to them to survey. And they did this every year and they kept very careful tables of this very information. So he had them all in and he and one of his colleagues Beatrice Webb, Beatrice Potter at that time, interviewed them and pumped them for all their information. And once they've surveyed all their answers, then he set about devising his questionnaire. He thought it was very important that he listened to the data that was coming in rather than him

formulate his kind of survey first and make the school board visitors information fit into preconceived notions that he might have. So that's how he said about it. Have I mentioned, Mayhew, there were novelists writing about that. at the time. The only one he rated at all was Gissing. He doesn't seem to have been interested in the work of Dickens. Part of his impatience. We've said he's impatient with the census.

He was impatient at this sort of indiscriminate giving of charity on completely non-scientific terms, which is how he saw it. But he was also impatient with novelists and certain journalists who wrote these very lurid, phantasmagoric passages about deep chronic London poverty. And he thought this was an exaggeration not just of scale, but of flavour. And he was determined.

He said the way he put it was that East London is a curtain on which people have drawn lots of very lurid and upsetting pictures. I'm not having any of that. I could go out and find sober tales and statistics and facts. and that's what I'm going to put in place of this novelistic and journalistic nonsense. He employed this platoon of people to do the day-to-day workup, going up and down the streets. They hoped every street in London, knocking on the door, every household. Some of them didn't open the doors, many, many did.

What walks of life did these people come from? The team was 20, five of whom were women, which is very interesting. They were plucked, they were hand-picked by. him from his professional and his social circle. So while it's true to say that the bulk of them were upper middle class and university educated, nevertheless, his first and longest lasting colleague Jesse Argyle had been a fairly humble, you know, white-collar clerk at the booth shipping line. Most of them are lost to history. We don't really know their names, with the exception of Beatrice Potter, Beatrice Webb, and he managed to cajole Octavia Hill to do a chapter on housing.

Thank you. Lawrence, Lawrence Goldman, this was a survey of its time. How did Booth separate people out into different classes? I don't think he came to the business of sort of social differentiation with any preconceptions, but quite early in the survey work, he began to crystallize the population of London into eight different groups. He called them classes. We perhaps wouldn't, but they were eight different groups from A at the bottom to H at the top. And they had these alphabetical discriminators, so we knew what we were talking about. And it might help just quickly to go through them so that you can understand the way he pictured the sociology of London. At the very bottom, Class A were occasional labourers and really, really, semi-criminal figures, a very small number, however, only about 1% of the population. Above them,

Class B were the sort of casual poor. They lived a hand-to-mouth existence. They worked infrequently for the very lowest wages. Classes C and D were what Booth would understand as the working poor, those who barely had sufficient for a decent, independent sort of family life. They were just about managing, as we might put it today, any mischance and they could be thrown into disaster. They had irregular work sometimes, but often they were just very ill paid. Above them were classes E and F, and this is really the bulk of the population of London. They were small businessmen and women, skilled tradesmen, shopkeepers, clerks, etc. People who could earn reasonably, had stable incomes and indeed could, as it were, build stable lives and

a proper family life. And classes E and F made up together, he reckoned something of the order of half of the population of the city. And then finally, of classes G and H, they were the middle class, as we would understand it, and then the upper class. Class G were professionals, doctors, larger business people and so forth. Class H was third. the wealthiest group, about 1% only. The same percentage is the very poorest. Of them all, I think he became more and more focused on classes C and D, the respectable poor, who, as it were, just about managing.

How to assist them, how to, as it were, encourage and sustain respectable working class life in those groups was probably the great question he began to ask himself. Thank you. Emma. Emma Griffin, why was the idea of a household important to Booth? All his research in line with the other surveys that have been done previously are based around the idea of the household rather than of the wage. So whereas we tend to measure economies today by looking at wages, in this period the household is a much more natural and appealing way of measuring

and understanding what's going on in society. We see that in the census, we see that in Booth, and we see that in most of the other surveys that have been done. And this is really because throughout the 19th century, there's no meaningful social security net. And rather than living in a society where everybody's out there earning their own wage and looking after their own needs, of course everybody is grouped together in households.

And that household is responsible for looking after itself, but as I say, very little in the way of social security for them in the instance that they might be struggling. And those households as well are very divided by gender. So men traditionally will be doing all of the wage earning and they certainly have much greater wage earning power all throughout this period. And households also require an awful lot of unpaid domestic labour, whether that's collecting wood or chopping wood, collecting water, lighting fires,

even the most humble cup of tea is going to require an awful lot of labour in this pre-industrial period or this pre-modern period. you need a lot of female labour in the household doing that work. And that's why the household is the sensible unit to be studying, because it gets together, kind of puts together both the income needs and the labour needs that people have in order to live reliably. Does this pay off in his survey? In your view? Well, yes, exactly. So you can start to see, through his survey, you can start to see why some of these families are struggling. So, I mean, clearly a male wage is going to go, much further in a small family of mother, father and one child than it is in a family of mother,

father and ten children. So the household is a more sensible unit of analysis there. But what also comes to life and what you can see quite nicely in the work that was done is that there are many households that don't have any kind of male wage coming into them at all. So the father may be absent, he may have passed away. And particularly if you've got a household where you don't have older sons who can step into the breach and take on the role of the male breadwinner. You may have a household without a male head and with large numbers of female inhabitants who will struggle enormously to maintain a reasonable standard of living on their female wages. So you can really see the frailties of this model through the work and through the information that

they collected. Sarah, as Arroyce, how did he define poverty? What did it look like to him? Come and be a little graphic here. Well, you're not allowed to be graphic because that's exactly what he was. railing against. But weirdly, I'll just get this in quickly. He starts off with volume one his introduction, you know, I'm not happy with novelists and I don't like certain journalists. And of course, what he goes on to produce despite himself and seemingly completely unaware of it

is an amazing compendium of very moving, touching, I won't say lurid, but very colourful scenes from his own strolls around London. So he's walking through a very poor district and a man with a barrel organ walks along. And everybody in the street, no matter what they're doing, stops what they're doing, and starts waltzing to the sound of the barrel organ. And if there's two men who can't sort of grab a woman and start waltzing, they will just grab another man and start waltzing

for all the time that the barrel organ is in the street. And I've not seen that kind of amazing vignette anywhere else in any other kind of writing about London at the end of the 19th century. So being poor to Charles Booth meant that you had the means that were barely sufficient to live a decent life and you faced an unending struggle and a total lack of comfort. Were you so unfortunate as to be in classes A or B, it was even worse than that. You probably didn't have a secure roof over your head and you may go hungry a lot of the time. So that's how he termed being poor.

It's lacking. it's lacking things. But yes, we cannot help. He included very distressing scenes from his various contributors, particularly in such places as Covent Garden, parts of Bethnal Green, parts of central South London,

going into these barely furnished damp rooms in which seven or eight people lived, many of them laid low with chronic illness, perhaps there's somebody else, he's still trying to eke out a living at some trade at which they were failing to earn a decent income. So despite himself, he does present very moving and colourful anecdotal evidence of deep poverty, as well as slightly less deep poverty. Lawrence, did this, Lord's Goldman, did this inspire him to urge the state to intervene?

Yes, indeed. I mean, one of the most important of the booth findings, is that poverty is caused for a very large proportion of the poor by questions, as he put it, of circumstance. And circumstance could mean illness, or it could mean a very large family size, but what it often meant was old age, because with old age came a decline in physical capacity to work. And with no means of support,

for many of the aged poor, there was only the workhouse, quite literally the poor law and the workhouse, which is where they ended their days. And this was a well-understood problem. By the end of the 19th century, there were many campaigners who could see that, as it were, it was only the workhouse that was left at the end of many workers and their family's lives. And so really the most important idea, I think, that comes out of his analysis of the causes of poverty is the problem of old age, and hence, the idea of the old age pension. And Booth is one of the very first people in this country to recognise the need to provide somehow for old age. And indeed he conceives of the idea of a state

funded old age pension. And really quite early on in the 1890s, he begins to write pamphlets about this and to campaign for it. And of course it does come eventually in 1908. We've said is a conservative. We said he started off a bit radical and got more conservative and became an Israeli out as he got older. Did he, was pensions the thing that he concentrated on or did he worry about other matters? There are many other matters that he focused on. And one of them controversially was, as it were, how to substantiate the means and the lives of the sort of classes C and D. They're just about managing those who were very poor but could just survive. And he floated ideas that became very controversial in his time. And indeed,

subsequently, historians have discussed them at some length also. And this was to try to deal with the problem of a very competitive labor market in London, which was pulling down wages. The remuneration of many people was simply too low for family life. By removing one of those eight classes from the London labour market, class B, the casual poor. And Booth floated the idea early on in the series of 17 volumes of labour colonies where the casual poor, who worked irregularly and for very low wages, but whose competition with those above them pulled down everybody else's wages, they would be decanted to work camps, quite literally, in the countryside, doing agricultural labour or construction or public works.

And this might be a solution to the problem of the London labour market. In that way, wages would go up because cheap labour would be removed from London. And this was very controversial, as you can imagine, although there were many also, some socialists, even the young William Beveridge, who endorsed the idea, though Beveridge later rescinded his support. Thank you, Emma. Emma Griffin, why did Booth decide to present his findings, not only in these 17 volumes, but in maps? And what did they reveal about London? I think that's very interesting. The way he decided to try and visualize the information that was coming out of the survey work in map form.

And it's worth harking back to what Sarah said a moment ago about Booth's pretensions to objectivity. although we may now read the text and notice how much it bears in common with more journalistic and novelistic attempts to think about the poor. That's certainly not the way that he conceived himself. He conceived himself as being an expert and as being objective and providing some neutral information. So I think the maps very much belong to that kind of conception of the work. What were the maps like? The maps themselves are really beautiful, very visually stunning. I think what we should also say about the maps is he's not the first or the only,

person producing maps at this particular time. So we know that there was a parish priest in Liverpool in the 1850s and the significance being of course with Booth's own connection with Liverpool. Parish peace called Abraham Hume, who also did some kind of survey work and did in much, much simpler form, and a much more rudimentary form. He colour coded them with religion, social and moral. So these kinds of maps have been out there in the past and Booth may well have seen this, There are temperance maps that are being produced at this time as well. So we've entered a period by the end of the 19th century where people are trying to make sense of this complex urban world

that they're living in and they're turning to maps. Sarah, what does Booth's colouring of the streets reveal about his values and what is the colouring? He's got seven colours for eight classes. And the reason for that is the colour purple, which comes right in the middle. He uses the colour purple to cover. cover everyone from C through to F, as long as there's an element of trade and business involved.

So that's how he tries to use that colour. So apart from that, black, the black streets, and this is where he's very interesting in his key to the map, lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal. And when you see that, you think, well, hang on a minute, I thought this was supposed to be a socio-economic survey. But there, we're bringing in one of his passions, which is character. is character being rotted and eroded amongst the working classes by the indiscriminate giving of charity. So next up we've got dark blue where you're very poor,

you're only casually employed and you're in chronic want, but you're not vicious or semi-criminal. So that's the difference there. He removes that kind of immorality as he saw it. Light blue, you're poor. You're right on the poverty line, which he put at 18 shillings to 21 shillings a week for a man and wife and two or three children

and that's light blue, you're poor. Purple I've already mentioned, it's a bit of a free-for-all but with business being high in the mix. And then pink is fairly comfortable, good, solid, ordinary working class wages you've probably got a little bit maybe to put away into your savings.

Then we've got red, which is middle class, then we've got yellow, which is gold, as Lawrence has already said. Seems to me that morality drains out of it as you go up, they're not only get richer, they get nice and better because they're richer. He never ever talks about character or morality or immorality

once you're into pink, red and yellow. That sense of you being lazy, drunken, feckless, parasitical is reserved purely for the written testimony relating to black, dark, dark blue and light blue and occasionally purple. So swindling with money or employing people on huge estates for next or nothing. They escape any sort of century at all.

Well, it should have been, if we could redraw it today, maybe we should put a black band around those yellow and gold streets to show high levels of white-collar crime and terrible landlords and ditto the red streets as well. But of course, that's not what he's getting at. He's thinking about character and morality

and how they interact with your earnings and your outgoings. He says, in his introductory part, the moral issue lies at the bottom of all of this. On top of that, we have the economic. But I think nonetheless we should give him credit because when he does his calculations, he concludes that, as it were, vicious habits and problems of behaviour only affect a very small percentage of London's population. And whereas beforehand, you know, Victorians would often imagine that poverty was the fault of the poor and poverty was

course by their behavior, their habits, their fecklessness and so forth. And that was very common to hear and read in Victorian society. What Booth did at least was put some numbers or attempt to put some numbers to the different types of poverty and the different causes. And although he was moralistic about those at the bottom, the vicious and the semi-criminal, in fact, his calculations show that there are rather small proportion, you know, under 5%, but indeed two or three percent only of the of the working population. So although you can hear that moralism, and Sarah's right, it's actually now got a figure associated with it,

and it's not a large proportion. By far the greatest number of poor were poor because of problems of occupation. They weren't paid enough or they worked irregularly. And Booth established that, in a sense, they weren't poor because of their own mistakes. they were poor because of the circumstances in which they laboured. Lawrence, what was changing in London in this period? What structures were breaking down? Did London look like 100 years on from, say, 1850? 50 years on, maybe 50. Was it changing its nature? Look.

If you say 1850, well, the population of London, the population then is about 2.5 million. But by 1900, the population of London is over 6 million. It's more than doubled in in half a century. A lot of migration was coming in to London of people coming in from the countryside in a period of agricultural depression. The larger kinds of employment of the past had moved, of course, to the industrial cities of the Midlands and the North. And what had taken its place was very small-scale manufacturing, lots of workshops, for example, lots of sweated trades, things like tailoring and boot and shoe-making in small enterprises which were unregulated and which of course bred poverty because most of the workers were paid by the piece.

They were paid for the shirt or the pair of trousers they produced. They weren't given any sort of living wage. And then as the city expanded its footprint, physically expanded, so you had a problem in a breakdown of the old parochial structure. The church couldn't cope because there were new suburbs, there were no churches, there was no Christian life, And this interested Booth greatly, and it largely explains why the final part of the life and labour series, the last seven volumes, in fact, are looking at the religious life of London. Something very important that changed in London, and completely coincidentally in 1889, at the same year as the publication of the first volume of life and labour, is the creation at long last of a proper council for London. The London County Council is created and has a sort of quasi-democratic election to get it for its first elections.

And what that returns to many people's surprise is a massive majority for the so-called progressive party, dominated by radical liberals and with a meaningful, although small socialist bench. So the LCC rolls its sleeves up and right away starts to tackle, really important infrastructure problems within London, not least the terrible housing problem. So I think across the 1890s, you start to see the very swift change in London, in the nature of London, because at long last you've got a meaningful authority that can make meaningful change. Added to that, you get the increasing democratisation of local government, where the franchise is increased

and working men and even women are able to come forward to take active roles in the distribution of poor law. So I think you get in the 1890s the sudden rush of modernisation to London and what I think this does with life and labour as it carries on publishing

over those years. My feeling is that across the mid to late 18, 1990s and early 20th century, it starts to look more and more like recent history. Beatrice Webb described Booth as the living embodiment of the mid-Victorian spirit. And I think what you see, particularly with the religious influences series, which didn't sell very well, is somebody clinging on to a way of thinking that is now very slightly passe. So you think that by the time his message goes out, it isn't having as great an effect as you would expect? I think many people turn to this amazing compendion of facts and figures and statistics,

and they use it to make their political point. You know, I can stand up at the LCC and say this, because Mr. Booth gives me a great table on this. I think loads of people use life and labour to make their political point. And I think the progressives, modernisers, if you like, left-leaning, radical liberal people, They seize on him and use his work, you know, as a kind of sledgehammer in their arguments. Do you see any connection between the survey and the arrival of old age pension, Sarah? Yes, absolutely. As Lawrence has already explained, he starts this passionate campaign in 1891,

once he's perused the voluminous Stepney Poor Law Union Workhouse registers, and he finds that 33% of the inmates are the age. people who may have spent their whole life very virtuously working and saving, but it gets wiped out by being elderly. So he makes this his real cause, and he tirelessly speaks, you know, speaks campaigns, writes on this subject to get a universal state pension of five shillings for everybody as soon as they reach 65. That's what he wanted. and many in his immediate circle, threw their hands up in horror, pointed the finger and said,

that's socialism, what on earth are you talking about? And he, I think a few friendships cooled, and they thought, what is this? He was called a utopian by people who ought to know better because he wanted to be able to lift this whole section of the poor up and out of the Victorian poor law because he recognised, as Lawrence has pointed out,

that they were poor through absolutely no fault of their own. Emma, can we just say one more, I had one more thing to the broader impact of the survey. In what areas did it matter? I think there's a lot more to say, really, about the impact of Booth and the impact of the survey. So I think there are obviously these very direct influences that he had on the political discourse of the time

and the old age pensions and discourse around unions. But I think there's a wider social impact as well. And I really love that idea that Sarah mentioned a moment ago about people standing up and using Booth as an authority to promote ideas and policies that were not necessarily in accordance with Booth's own views. So what Booth has done as he has created an enormous body of knowledge, maps, tables, notebooks, interviews, there's this clear appearance of comprehensive research and of objectivity. and it provides heft to his arguments, but it also provides heft to the argument that other people want to develop perhaps for other things as well. So it's really about a new way of trying to understand social problems,

of trying to understand the world around us, the origins of social science, of the social survey. And I think there are really a host of kind of broader intellectual legacies that have come out of this work. Finally, Sarah, what is the longer-term legacy? What's the main? Is there a longer-term legacy of this survey? Well, Emma's correct. I think she's correcting everything she's just said. I do ask myself sometimes if Booth had never written life and labour,

would the trajectory of what came next be any different? We know that when the Liberal Party win its landslide in 1906 and between then and 1911 start serious structural national reforms, which will improve the lives of the working class, we know that they referred to Seabom Roundtree's York survey, which came out in 1901, which is seen as the next great social survey and very much inspired by Booth.

And we do know that various Liberals are again pointing to Booth, but I do wonder if Booth hadn't happened, I think the Liberals would just have gone ahead and done what they did anyway, possibly not. us quickly. Laura Sherman. He is part of a whole host of other forces that are going on at this time. And it's very easy.

And there's a very kind of, it's very tempting to look back at the big man in history who turned our history down a different road altogether through what he did. But he was part of a very large team. And he's part of bigger movements, as I've been saying, about maps and social surveys and journalistic work that's all there. And he does it on a. much bigger scale, but it's a question of, it's a different, it's a degree, it's a question of degree rather than of kind. And I think that's, so I have a lot of, I have a lot of sympathy

with what Sarah is suggesting as well, actually. Do you have a full stop to this, Lawrence? Well, only that I think what Booth said and what some people took to be true was that he, he was trying to bring a scientific approach to the study of these questions. And what Sarah and Emma have said are absolutely right. There's lots of journalism. There's, There's lots of reportage. Many people go slumming. They go into the East End and they write about what they see and they try to, as it were, energize social reform by drawing people's attention to all the problems. But Booth stands back and tries to count, as we've said at the beginning. He's very interested in statistics. And he presents his survey as social science. And that's

very important because it tries to take it above the fray and present it as objective. And it's something that, as it were, all the policy makers can work with. And we may question whether that is scientific or not, but that's important, I think. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Lawrence, Lance Goldman, Emma Griffin and Sarah Wise, and to our studio engineer Emma Hath. Next week, it's Edward Gibbon, an outstanding figure in the English Enlightenment, and famously the author of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Thank you for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did we not talk about that you wish we had done? I'd like to have spoken about what an enjoyable read much of life and labour is for all the wrong reasons and all the reasons that Booth probably wouldn't have thought he was doing. lovely, lovely eyewitness accounts by the man himself as he sets out for a night of walking around London what he sees, what he hears, what he smells. And you get images and vignettes in his prose covering things that I've never seen done elsewhere by any of these novelists or slumming journalists.

He adores wandering around the market in London, in Lambeth, the cut in Lambeth. All the things that are for sale, all the items. It's just this amazing scene of this man enjoying a world, almost like he's on holiday, a world that isn't his and not feeling remotely threatened by it. And you get a real sense of life and vivacity. Ditto when he goes to the market at Brick Lane. Sorry, did he go on his own? Yes, he did on those walks, yes.

I think, funny enough, I think most of them all did their own walking and visits around London alone. I think they did that, which is a sign that, you know, you're not going to get sort of mugged or murdered as soon as you walk down a dark lane in a poor area. He strolls down the Whitechapel Road and he goes into a common lodging house, into the kitchen, and he watches as these very poor men sit and chat and joke and have songs. and then these evangelists turn up with a harmonium and make them listen to half an hour of hymns and sermons and he feels so sorry for the men. He doesn't say it, but it's obvious that he's completely on their side.

Who the hell are these busy bodies lecturing to these people who've got nothing? So it's absolutely rammed with these little moments. And you think, oh, great, this is better than a novel. Couldn't agree with you more. It's just worth adding that he spent periods, It's three different periods living in the households of working families for several weeks at a time. And he would base himself in a household. It was normally a respectable and well-found working class household.

And then, as it were, set out from there to try to understand life in that neighbourhood. And life has lived in that household. So he was a participant as well as an observer, really. His wife, Mary said he really, he preferred the food of the poor. We know that he had regular bouts of terrible ill health that we've never got to the bottom of and I wonder whether it was gastric but he said all he liked was the sort of bread and marge

and dripping and tea that he got at his East End land ladies' houses. But I also love this idea that he can just step into people's houses and neutrally observe and comment on everything that's going on inside the house and you see this a lot in the notebooks and in the published volumes as well where this well-dressed, well-nourished middle-class person is obviously standing at the door and peering in and thinks that they're going to get a kind of an open and true account of everything that's going on inside that household.

But of course, we know people don't share private information about their households with anybody who knocks on the door. So there is this strange, very strange dynamic that's going on there that is completely edited out in the volumes. But you get little glimmers of as you read through and you do wonder if the people behind the door, well, you do wonder really what they make of these visitors at their door. Can I just get a plug in here?

I don't work for the LSC, so it's not going to do me any good, but the LSC are just about to put all of the 450 booth notebooks up on their booth website. So if anybody wants to read digitise versions of the books themselves, rather than the printed volumes, that's going to be happening very, very soon. And it's certainly the case, isn't it, that people say that the notebooks and when you read them are much more vivid. They're full of anecdote and interesting detail, which Booth, perhaps because he wants to be a social scientist, edits out of the volumes as he writes them. So the volumes are quite sober. But the notebooks are full of life and colour and all sorts of judgments, which make them actually very interesting as sort of social historical documents.

Yes, and though he does, Lawrence, as though he does edit out some of that moralistic judgment that's in the notebooks and not in the published volumes, he doesn't edit all of it out and he doesn't edit it out very successfully. So I think there's lots of moralistic judgment that's peeping through in the pages of the printed volumes as well. He just can't edit out with the best will in the world. He just can't edit out his own personal feelings towards what it is that he's encountering and his own personal interpretation of it. Could I change the focus a little? I've never seen anything written about booth in America, booth and America. We know that every autumn for about 30 years from the late 1870s, he goes to America and his offices are in New York and his factories in New Jersey and he sees other cities as well. And it's always struck me that, I mean, many of the changes that we've discussed in the program in London are going on in New York.

and other great American cities. And we know he's interested in American writing on sociology and economics as well. And I've always wondered what was the impact of the United States on Booth. And I suspect there's work that we could do there, really, because it would have given him a frame of reference for understanding London,

although he doesn't really ever compare London, as far as I'm aware, with other great cities. So I just wonder to what extent. extent America does provide him, you know, with a different view and a way of comparing. Thank you all very much. That was smashing. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Welcome to Descendants, the series which looks into our lives and our past and asks something pretty simple. How close are each of our lives to the legacy of Britain's role in slavery?

And who does that mean our lives are linked to? Narrated by me, Yersa Daily Ward, We hear from those who have found themselves connected to each other through this history. Whoever you are, wherever you are in Britain, the chances are this touches your life somewhere, somehow. Descendants from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.