Routledge Revivals: Charles Booth's London (1969)

A Portrait of the Poor at the Turn of the Century, Drawn from His "Life and Labour of the People in London"

Albert Fried, Richard M. Elman, Albert Fried, Richard M. Elman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351981576
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

First published in 1969, this book presents a one-volume anthology of Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London, the classic early study of the poor in the urban environment. The original text consists of a vast compendium of descriptions of families, homes, streets, conditions of work, cultural and religious practices, much of it illustrated with charts, maps and statistics — giving the public an idea of the dimensions and meaning of poverty. The editors have selected the extracts in this book for their vividness, readability and intrinsic interest, and their introduction conveys the context of 1880s London — relating Booth's investigations to contemporary concerns.

Chapter 1
Poverty

Booth’s initial investigations of London poverty make up the bulk of this chapter. It contains his explanation of his methods, his classifications of the poor, illustrative material on their lives, case histories, and descriptions of specific streets, neighborhoods, and sections.

The School Board Visitors^*

THE SCHOOL BOARD VISITORS PERFORM AMONGST THEM A house-to-house visitation; every house in every street is in their books, and details are given of every family with children of school age. They begin their scheduling two or three years before the children attain school age, and a record remains in their books of children who have left school. The occupation of the head of the family is noted down. Most of the visitors have been working in the same district for several years, and thus have an extensive knowledge of the people. It is their business to re-schedule for the Board once a year, but intermediate revisions are made in addition, and it is their duty to make themselves acquainted, so far as possible, with new-comers into their districts. They are in daily contact with the people, and have a very considerable knowledge of the parents of the school children, especially of the poorest amongst them, and of the conditions under which they live. No one can go, as I have done, over the description of the inhabitants of street after street in this huge district, taken house by house and family by family—full as it is of picturesque details noted down from the lips of the visitor to whose mind they have been recalled by the open pages of his own schedules—and doubt the genuine character of the information and its truth.… I am indeed embarrassed by its mass, and by my resolution to make use of no fact to which I cannot give a quantitative value. The materials for sensational stories lie plentifully in every book of our notes; but, even if I had the skill to use my material in this way—that gift of the imagination which is called “realistic”—I should not wish to use it here. There is struggling poverty, there is destitution, there is hunger, drunkenness, brutality, and crime; no one doubts that it is so. My object has been to attempt to show the numerical relation which poverty, misery, and depravity bear to regular earnings and comparative comfort, and to describe the general conditions under which each class lives….

With regard to the disadvantages under which the poor labour, and the evils of poverty, there is a great sense of helplessness: the wage-earners are helpless to regulate their work and cannot obtain a fair equivalent for the labour they are willing to give; the manufacturer or dealer can only work within the limits of competition; the rich are helpless to relieve want without stimulating its sources….

… At the outset we shut our eyes, fearing lest any prejudice of our own should colour the information we received. It was not till the books were finished that I or my secretaries ourselves visited the streets amongst which we had been living in imagination. But later we gained confidence, and made it a rule to see each street ourselves at the time we received the visitors’ account of it. With the insides of the houses and their inmates there was no attempt to meddle. To have done so would have been an unwarrantable impertinence; and, besides, a contravention of our understanding with the School Board, who object, very rightly, to any abuse of the delicate machinery with which they work. Nor, for the same reason, did we ask the visitors to obtain information specially for us. We dealt solely with that which comes to them in a natural way in the discharge of their duties.

The amount of information obtained varied with the different visitors; some had not been long at the work, and amongst those who had been, there was much difference in the extent of their knowledge; some might be less trustworthy than others: but taking them as a body I cannot speak too highly of their ability and good sense.… The merit of the information so obtained, looked at statistically, lies mainly in the breadth of view obtained. It is in effect the whole population that comes under review. Other agencies usually seek out some particular class or deal with some particular condition of people. The knowledge so obtained may be more exact, but it is circumscribed and very apt to produce a distortion of judgment. For this reason, the information to be had from the School Board visitors, with all its inequalities and imperfections, is excellent as a framework for a picture of the Life and Labour of the People.

The population brought directly under schedule—viz., heads of families and school children coming under the ken of the School Board visitors, with the proportion of wives and of older or younger children all partly or wholly dependent on these heads of families and sharing their life—amounts to from one-half to two-thirds of the whole population….

The special difficulty of making an accurate picture of so shifting a scene as the low-class streets in East London present is very evident, and may easily be exaggerated. As in photographing a crowd, the details of the picture change continually, but the general effect is much the same, whatever moment is chosen. I have attempted to produce an instantaneous picture, fixing the facts on my negative as they appear at a given moment, and the imagination of my readers must add the movement, the constant changes, the whirl and turmoil of life. In many districts the people are always on the move; they shift from one part of it to another like “fish in a river.” The School Board visitors follow them as best they may, and the transfers from one visitor’s book to another’s are very numerous. On the whole, however, the people usually do not go far, and often ding from generation to generation to one vicinity, almost as if the set of streets which lie there were an isolated country village.

The Setting^*

IF LONDON NORTH OF THE THAMES IS CONSIDERED AS A SEMI-circle of which the City is an enlarged centre, the part with which I am about to deal forms a quadrant, having for its radii Kings-land Road running due north, and the River Thames running due east. Between these lies the Mile End Road (continued as the Bow Road to Bow), while a similar division more to the north may be made in the line of Hackney, dividing the quadrant into three equal segments, but the route to Hackney is deflected by Victoria Park, and no street exactly occupies the line. The district also includes Hoxton and De Beauvoir Town lying to the west of Kingsland Road, but is otherwise co-extensive with this quadrant. The City itself has a radius of nearly a mile, and outside of this London extends to the north and east from 3 to 4 miles. The greatest extension is at Stamford Hill, where the boundary is 4½ miles from Southwark Bridge, and the least at Bow, where it is 3½ miles from the same point. There is, however, less difference than these figures would seem to show in the actual extension of London, for from the City to Bow, the entire space is built over, whereas at Stamford Hill and Clapton there are still some open fields, and further south and east the Metropolitan boundary includes some marshy land, unbuilt on, which skirts the River Lea. A circle drawn 3 miles outside the City boundary practically includes the whole inhabited district; and this may be divided into two parts—an inner ring of 1½ miles ending at the Regent’s Canal, and an outer ring of similar width extending to Stoke Newington, Clapton, Homerton, Hackney, Old Ford, Bow, Bromley, and the East India Docks. The line of the Regent’s Canal, which very closely follows the curve of the inner ring, marks a real change in the character of the district. Slight as this obstacle might be supposed to be, it yet seems to have been sufficient to gird in the swelling sides of London, and it is in itself a girdle of poverty, the banks of the canal being, along nearly its whole length, occupied by a very poor population.

The inner ring consists of most of Shoreditch, Bethnal Green (excepting the Victoria Park end), all Whitechapel and St. George’s, Wapping, Shadwell, and Ratcliff, with the inlying portions of Mile End, for the most part tightly packed with buildings, and crowded with inhabitants, except where occupied by business premises. Space and air are everywhere at a premium—the largest scale map shows as open spaces only a few churchyards and old burial grounds. A similar condition of things extends along the river bank, over Limehouse and Poplar proper, which lie within the outer ring, but the rest of this ring, consisting of Bow, Bromley, the outermost parts of Mile End and Bethnal Green, and the whole of Hackney, show a different character. Not only are there some large spaces open to the public—Hackney Downs, London Fields, and Victoria Park—but the map begins everywhere to show more ground than buildings. The streets are wider; the houses have gardens of some sort; and in the houses themselves fewer people are packed. In the inner ring nearly all available space is used for building, and almost every house is filled up with families. It is easy to trace the process. One can see what were the original buildings; in many cases they are still standing, and between them, on the large gardens of a past state of things, has been built the small cottage property of to-day. Houses of three rooms, houses of two rooms, houses of one room—houses set back against a wall or back to back fronting it may be on to a narrow footway, with posts at each end and a gutter down the middle. Small courts contrived to utilize some space in the rear, and approached by archway under the building which fronts the street. of such sort are the poorest class of houses. Besides the evidence of configuration, these little places are often called “gardens,” telling their story with unintended irony. But in other cases all sentiment is dropped, and another tale about their origin finds expression in the name “So and so’s rents”—not houses, nor dwellings, nor cottages, nor buildings, nor even a court or a yard, suggesting human needs, but just “rents.”

Another sort of filling up which is very common now is the building of workshops. These need no new approach, they go with, and belong to, the houses, and access to them is had through the houses. One I know of is arranged floor by floor, communicating with the respective floors of the house in front by a system of bridges. These workshops may or may not involve more crowding in the sense of more residents to the acre, but they, in any case, occupy the ground, obstruct light, and shut out air. Many are the advantages of sufficient open space behind a house, whether it be called garden or yard, for economy, comfort, and even pleasure. Those who have seen no more, have at least obtained a sort of bird’s-eye view of such places from the window of a railway carriage, passing along some viaduct raised above the chimneys of two-storeyed London. Seen from a distance, the clothes-lines are the most visible thing. Those who have not such outside accommodation must dry the clothes in the room in which they eat, and very likely also sleep; while those, more common, who have a little scrap of yard or stretch ropes across the court in front, still suffer much discomfort from the close proximity to door and window of their own and their neighbours’ drying garments. From the railway may be seen, also, small rough-roofed erections, interspersed with little glass houses. These represent hobbies, pursuits of leisure hours—plants, flowers, fowls, pigeons, and there is room to sit out, when the weather is fine enough, with friend and pipe. Such pleasures must go when the workshop invades the back yard; and it need hardly be pointed out how essential is sufficient space behind each house for sanitation.

Worse again than the interleaving of small cottage property or the addition of workshops, is the solid backward extension, whether for business premises or as tenements, or as common lodging-houses, of the buildings which front the street; and this finally culminates in quarters where house reaches back to house, and means of communication are opened through and through, for the convenience and safeguard of the inhabitants in case of pursuit by the police. The building of large blocks of dwellings, an effort to make crowding harmless, is a vast improvement, but it only substitutes one sort of crowding for another. Nor have all blocks of dwellings a good character, either from a sanitary or moral point of view.

All these methods of filling up have been, and some of them still are, at work in the inner ring. This is true throughout, but otherwise each district has its peculiar characteristics.

The area dealt with is composed of the following unions of parishes or registration districts, containing in all about 900,OCX) inhabitants:—

East London—
Shoreditc … … … … …. .	124,000
Bethnal Green … … … … …	130,000
Whitechapel … … … … ….	76,000
St. George’s-in-the-East … … …. .	49,000
Stepney … … … … … ….	63,000
Mile End Old Town … … … …	112,000
Poplar … … … … … ….	169,000
Hackney … … … … … …. .	186,000
Total	909,000

The Eight Classes”^*

THE 8 CLASSES INTO WHICH I HAVE DIVIDED THESE PEOPLE ARE:

1. The lowest class of occasional labourers, loafers, and semi-criminals.
2. Casual earnings—“very poor.”
3. Intermittent earnings together the “Poor”.
4. Small regular earnings together the “Poor”.
5. Regular standard earnings—above the line of poverty.
6. Higher class labour.
7. Lower middle class.
8. Upper middle class.

The divisions indicated here by “poor” and “very poor” are necessarily arbitrary. By the word “poor” I mean to describe those who have a sufficiently regular though bare income, such as 18s 21s^* per week for a moderate family, and by “very poor” those who from any cause fall much below this standard. The “poor” are those whose means may be sufficient, but are barely sufficient, for decent independent life; the “very poor” those whose means are insufficient for this according to the usual standard of life in this country. My “poor” may be described as living under a struggle to obtain the necessaries of life and make both ends meet; while the “very poor” live in a state of chronic want. It may be their own fault that this is so; that is another question; my first business is simply with the numbers who, from whatever cause, do live under conditions of poverty or destitution.…

On the whole it will be seen that St. George’s-in-the-East is the poorest district, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Prefatory Note
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Poverty
• Chapter 2 Occupations
• Chapter 3 The Jews of London
• Chapter 4 Religion and Culture
• Chapter 5 Illustrations: Random Observations from Booth’s Notebooks
• Chapter 6 Recommendations
• Bibliography