Charles Booth's pioneering survey, Life and Labour of the People in London, published in 17 volumes between 1889 and 1903, was a landmark in empirical social investigation. His panorama of London life has dominated all subsequent accounts: its scope, precision and detail make it an unrivalled source for the period. Mr. Charles Booth's Inquiry is the first systematic account of the making of the survey, based upon an intensive examination of the huge Booth archive. This contains far more material than was eventually published, in particular on women, work, religion, education, housing and social relations, as well as on poverty. While the book acknowledges the leading role of Booth himself, it highlights the significance of the contributions of his associates, including Beatrice Potter (Webb), Octavia Hill, Llewellyn Smith and G.H. Duckworth. Life and Labour of the People in London is a founding text of both social history and modern sociology. It has however commonly been misunderstood and frequently misused. Mr. Charles Booth's Inquiry sets the survey in perspective and demonstrates the richness of the Booth archive and its potential for modern scholarship in both history and the social sciences.

This insightful, evocative, and sumptuous volume brings Charles Booth's landmark survey of late nineteenth-century London to a new audience.

This 1901-1902 survey of the state of English agriculture was influential, suggesting many reforms which were subsequently implemented.

Reproduction of the original: In Darkest England and the Way out by General William Booth

Charles Booth’s seventeen-volume series, The Life and Labour of the People in London (1886–1903), is a staple of late Victorian social history and a monumental work of scholarship. Despite these facts, historians have paid little attention to its section on religious influences. Thomas Gibson-Brydon’s The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London seeks to remedy this neglect. Combing through the interviews Booth and his researchers conducted with 1,800 churchmen and women, Gibson-Brydon not only brings to life a cast of characters – from “Jesusist” vicars to Peckham Rye preachers to women drinkers – but also uncovers a city-wide audit of charitable giving and philanthropic practices. Discussing the philosophy of Booth, the genesis of his Religious Influences Series, and the agents and recipients of London charity, this study is a frank testimony on British moral segregation at the turn of the century. In critiquing the idea of working-class solidarity and community-building traditionally portrayed by many leading social and labour historians, Gibson-Brydon displays a meaner, bleaker reality in London’s teeming neighbourhoods. Demonstrating the wealth of untapped information that can be gleaned from Booth’s archives, The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London raises new questions about working-class communities, cultures, urbanization, and religion at the height of the British Empire.

From a rare map of yellow fever in eighteenth-century New York, to Charles Booth’s famous maps of poverty in nineteenth-century London, an Italian racial zoning map of early twentieth-century Asmara, to a map of wealth disparities in the banlieues of twenty-first-century Paris, Mapping Society traces the evolution of social cartography over the past two centuries. In this richly illustrated book, Laura Vaughan examines maps of ethnic or religious difference, poverty, and health inequalities, demonstrating how they not only serve as historical records of social enquiry, but also constitute inscriptions of social patterns that have been etched deeply on the surface of cities. The book covers themes such as the use of visual rhetoric to change public opinion, the evolution of sociology as an academic practice, changing attitudes to physical disorder, and the complexity of segregation as an urban phenomenon. While the focus is on historical maps, the narrative carries the discussion of the spatial dimensions of social cartography forward to the present day, showing how disciplines such as public health, crime science, and urban planning, chart spatial data in their current practice. Containing examples of space syntax analysis alongside full colour maps and photographs, this volume will appeal to all those interested in the long-term forces that shape how people live in cities.

In the 1840s, a young cowkeeper and his wife arrive in London, England, having walked from coastal Wales with their cattle. They hope to escape poverty, but instead they plunge deeper into it, and the family, ensconced in one of London’s “black holes,” remains mired there for generations. The Cowkeeper’s Wish follows the couple’s descendants in and out of slum housing, bleak workhouses and insane asylums, through tragic deaths, marital strife and war. Nearly a hundred years later, their great-granddaughter finds herself in an altogether different London, in southern Ontario. In The Cowkeeper’s Wish, Kristen den Hartog and Tracy Kasaboski trace their ancestors’ path to Canada, using a single family’s saga to give meaningful context to a fascinating period in history—Victorian and then Edwardian England, the First World War and the Depression. Beginning with little more than enthusiasm, a collection of yellowed photographs and a family tree, the sisters scoured archives and old newspapers, tracked down streets, pubs and factories that no longer exist, and searched out secrets buried in crumbling ledgers, building on the fragments that remained of family tales. While this family story is distinct, it is also typical, and so all the more worth telling. As a working-class chronicle stitched into history, The Cowkeeper’s Wish offers a vibrant, absorbing look at the past that will captivate genealogy enthusiasts and readers of history alike.