Charles Booth (philanthropist)

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Rt. Hon. Charles Booth (1840-1916) was an English philanthropist and social researcher, most famed for his work on documenting working class life in London at the end of the 19th century. He was born in Liverpool, the son of a corn merchant.

[edit] Background

Charles Booth was born into a wealthy Liverpool ship-owning company and in the mid-1880s, he moved the company's offices to London. Profoundly concerned by contemporary social problems, and not a pious nor even a religious man, he recognized the limitations of philanthropy and conditional charity in addressing the poverty which scarred British society. Without any commission other than his own he devised, organised, and funded one of the most comprehensive and scientific social surveys of London life that had then been undertaken. Booth also added his voice to the cause of state old age pensions as a practical instrument of social policy to alleviate destitution in old age, established as one of the commonest causes of pauperism. Simultaneously he was a successful businessman, running international interests in the leather industry and a steam shipping line.

[edit] Main Works

His most famous work is undoubtedly the seventeen-volume Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–1903), parts of which were read before the Royal Statistical Society in May 1887 and May 1888. He was aided in his work by other academics of the time such as Stephen N. Fox, Clara E. Collet, David F. Schloss and H. Llewellyn Smith. Beatrice Potter, the future Beatrice Webb, also participated.

This work can be seen as one of the founding texts of British sociology, drawing on both quantitative (statistical) methods and qualitative methods (particurly ethnography). Because of this, it was an influence on Chicago School sociology (notably the work of Robert E. Park) and later the discipline of community studies associated with the Institute of Community Studies in East London.

Booth began work on Life and Labour of the People in London in 1885 after reading the results of a survey undertaken by the Social Democratic Foundation, which claimed that 25% of Londoners lived in abject poverty. He considered this figure to be exaggerated for the purposes of socialist propaganda, and set out with the original intention of disproving it. However, Booth came to the conclusion (which shocked him and others) that in fact 30.7% of Londoners lived in povertiuihky.