Charles Booth's London Poverty Maps

A splendid - and necessary - publication...a great resource
Iain Sinclair
Charles Booth's landmark survey of life in late-19th-century London, published for the first time in one volume.
In the late 19th century, Charles Booth's landmark social and economic survey found that 35% of Londoners were living in abject poverty. Between 1886 and 1903, Booth's team of social investigators interviewed Londoners from all walks of life, recording their comments, together with their own unrestrained remarks and statistical information, in 450 notebooks. Their findings formed the basis of Booth's colour-coded social mapping (from vicious and semi-criminal to wealthy) and his Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People of London. Organized into 12 geographical sections, Charles Booth's London Poverty Maps presents the meticulously hand-coloured preparatory and final printed social mapping of London. Accompanying the colour-coded maps are selected reproductions of pages from the original notebooks, containing anecdotes related by Londoners of every trade, class, creed and nationality together with observations by Booth's interviewers that reveal much about their social class and moral views. An introduction by Mary S. Morgan clarifies the aims and methodology of Booth's survey, and six themed essays by experts in the field contextualize the survey's findings, illustrated by evocative period photographs.Completing the re-evaluation of Booth's seminal social survey are newly rendered infographics presenting the raw statistics relating to living conditions,employment status and poverty levels for each geographical section of London.

Mary S. Morgan is Professor of the History of Economics in the London School of Economics.