Booth Survey Research Articles

The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London: Charles Booth, Christian Charity, and the Poor-but-Respectable by Thomas Gibson-Brydon

Reviewed by: The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London: Charles Booth, Christian Charity, and the Poor-but-Respectable by Thomas Gibson-Brydon Lynn MacKay Thomas Gibson-Brydon, The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London: Charles Booth, Christian Charity, and the Poor-but-Respectable (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2016) While this study offers valuable information on Charles Booth's least known London investigation, his religious survey begun in the late 1890s, it [End Page 353] must be used with caution. The book grew out of Gibson-Brydon's doctoral dissertation, which, unfortunately, he did not live long enough to revise – a task which was subsequently undertaken by his supervisor, Brian Lewis, and a friend, Hillary Kaell. In his study, Gibson-Brydon argues for a different understanding both of Charles Booth and of the London poor. He denies that Booth's survey should be seen as a precursor to modern social scientific investigation (as a number of historians have argued), claiming instead that it was deeply marked throughout by a moral vision and purpose. The first two chapters introduce Booth, the man, and his religious survey. In Chapter 1, Gibson-Brydon first explores Booth's religious beliefs, arguing that the latter saw religion "as a broad moral influence that could order society." (11) He then sets out the still wide-ranging influence of the evangelical impulse in late 19th-century society. The second chapter explores Booth's specific research agenda, and his classification scheme, arguing that he believed competition to be necessary in order to revitalize character, even though this meant there would always be some in "persistent misery." (38) Gibson-Brydon repeatedly argues that Booth found the causes of poverty in character and morality (or lack thereof), rather than in structural problems within the economy. In this approach, Gibson-Brydon says Booth shared much with the Charity Organisation Society (cos), a group to which a number of historians have hitherto contrasted Booth's understanding of poverty and philanthropy. Gibson-Brydon argues that the two "are best seen as competitors in an intensely subjective field of charity control, each armed with the same ideas about the immoral poor," (11) and he concludes that most of the ministers whom Booth interviewed were attempting to give charity carefully in ways that tallied closely with the cos mindset, in spite of incarnational theology's focus on loving the poor. The fourth chapter focuses on the role of women as agents in the control of charity. Gibson-Brydon is deeply critical of religious leaders, arguing that they took for granted, and demeaned, the contributions of women in charitable endeavours. Ministers regularly accused female charitable agents of giving indiscriminately to the unworthy as well as the deserving, even though Gibson-Brydon says evidence suggests women were equally committed to the kind of approach favoured by Booth and the cos. Indeed, he argues that women, as frontline charitable workers visiting the poor, were largely responsible for providing the raw data upon which Booth built his classification system. In the last two chapters of the book Gibson-Brydon turns to the subjects of Booth's investigations: the poor themselves. In Chapter 5, he discusses what he calls "a socially conservative response to inequality" (14) on the part of working-class people. He says that Booth's hierarchy of classes came from the poor themselves (rather than being a middle-class imposition), and this was the case because working people bought into the middle-class ideology of respectability. The poor-but-respectable, as he terms them, did so because of anxiety that they might be pitched into absolute poverty. Gibson-Brydon says, "perpetually struggling for and sometimes unable to reach poor-but-respectable goals, working people took every opportunity to displace aggression, targeting their own perceived inferiors within the community." (14) Gibson-Brydon sees working people not as a unified class entity, but existing in a myriad of hierarchical social gradations within which men and women tenaciously defended their place against those below them and aspired to rise to the status of those above them. Not surprisingly, he [End Page 354] denies the existence of class consciousness, saying that E.P. Thompson...

Book Review

Davey Smith , G., Dorling , D. and Shaw , M. (eds) Poverty, Inequality and Health in Britain 1800–2000: a Reader . Bristol : The Policy Press , 2001 , £15.99 and £50.00 , lxxxvii + 373pp . ISBN 186134211X (pbk), 1861343280 (hbk) . This publication draws together extracts from some of the most important writing in the history of poverty, inequality and health in Britain in the last 200 years. A number of the texts in this collection should prove familiar, including Booth's survey of poverty in London (in the late 1880s), Rowntree's York study (1899), the Beveridge Report (1942) and the Acheson Report (1998). Others may be less well known including Clarkston's essays on the African slave trade, written in the late 18th century, and a chapter from McGonigle and Kirby's Poverty and Public Health (1936). Given the breadth of the pieces, the editors should be congratulated for their skilful selection and editing of the 29 extracts that constitute this collection. However, some of the history in the introductory chapter and the ‘timeline’ that follows could have been better handled. There are minor irritations, such as the description of the paintings of Clarkson and Malthus as ‘photographs’. More seriously the complexity of historical change seems to be understated, and longstanding debates in the historiography neglected. Amongst the omissions, for example, are the victories and defeats of popular movements that inspired the revolutionaries, reformists and reactionaries whose work appears in this volume. The significance of the French Revolution is recognized, but Chartism in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, considered by some as the first working-class struggle for direct democracy, and the revolutions that swept through the rest of Europe in 1848, are largely ignored. Yet it was in this world of upheaval that Farr, Chadwick, Marx, Engels and Mayhew produced their analyses of poverty that are included in this collection. The 1840s allowed for new ways of understanding society to emerge and included insights into how inequality and health were interconnected. This was ‘no accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain’, as Engels would later point out. Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Working Class further illustrates the importance of understanding the relevance of the historical contexts in which ideas succeed or fail. National public health reform took another six years after Chadwick's masterpiece was published in 1842. The delay in implementation has been ascribed to ‘sinister interests’ combined with administrative difficulties and public inertia. The forces for change included the middle class Health of Towns Association (founded in 1839) and a growing public fear of cholera, along with the efforts of the civil servant Chadwick. There is also little recognition of the ways in which poverty has been addressed differently across Britain. By the 19th century many of those in poverty who could be supported under the Poor Law in England could not be assisted in Scotland. Indeed fewer Scots in need were receiving assistance in 1890 than had been the case in 1830. By the 1920s the parish welfare system in Scotland was collapsing amid protest and riot. And within Scotland the Parish Councils responded differently to the crisis. At points, the introduction falls into too simple a duality. The argument is portrayed as having progressives offering socioeconomic explanations on one side and conservatives explaining poverty as a result of individual ignorance, drunkenness and immorality on the other side. Of course the circumstance/lifestyle debate can be identified as a common theme in a great deal of the literature, but there are other historical threads. The rise of working class respectability (including hygiene) in the 19th century might have been considered a corrective in this context. By the beginning of the 20th century there were socialists and communists who were campaigning for the collective storming of the commanding heights of the economy while asserting the values of sobriety and physical exercise. Amongst the debates missed are the long-term consequences of the Second World War that continue to be hotly contested by historians, including those who believe that postwar ‘reforms’ limited social change and sustained inequalities. One leading historian of the period has convincingly argued that the conflict simply pushed society in Britain at a slightly faster pace in the same direction in which it had been heading before 1939. Despite these reservations, the extracts in this volume will provide an excellent resource for researchers and teachers of health inequalities. Historians working in this area will especially welcome the collection.

The Ghost of Christmas Past: health effects of poverty in London in 1896 and 1991

Objectives: To compare the extent to which late 20th century patterns of mortality in London are predicted by contemporary patterns of poverty and by late 19th century patterns of poverty....

The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880-1940

List of figures List of tables List of maps Notes on contributors Preface 1. The social survey in historical perspective Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales and Kathryn Kish Sylar 2. The social survey in social perspective, 1830-1930 Eileen Janes Yeo 3. Charles Booth's survey of Life and Labour of the People in London 1889-1903 Kevin Bales 4. Hull-House Maps and Papers: social science as women's work in the 1890s Kathryn Kish Sylar 5. The place of social investigation, social theory and social work in the approach to late Victorian and Edwardian social problems: the case of Beatrice Webb and Helen Bosanquet Jane Lewis 6. W. E. B. Du Bois as a social investigator: The Philadelphia Negro 1899 Martin Bulmer 7. Concepts of poverty in the British social surveys from Charles Booth to Arthur Bowley E. P. Hennock 8. The part in relation to the whole: how to generalise? The prehistory of representative sampling Alain Desrosieres 9. The Pittsburgh Survey and the Social Survey Movement: a sociological road not taken Steven R. Cohen 10. The world of the academic quantifiers: the Columbia University family and its connections Stephen P. Turner 11. The decline of The Social Survey Movement and the rise of American empirical sociology Martin Bulmer 12. The social survey in Germany before 1933 Irmela Gorges 13. Anglo-American contacts in the development of research methods before 1945 Jennifer Platt 14. The social survey in historical perspective: a governmental perspective Roger Davidson 15. The dangers of castle building - surveying the social survey Seth Koven Index.

The New Survey of London Life and Labour

THIS continuation of Charles Booth's Survey of London, of forty years ago, has everything to commend it. The new editor-in-chief, Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith, quotes very aptly from Charles Booth on his title page: “Comparisons with the past are absolutely necessary to the comprehension of all that exists to-day; without them we cannot penetrate to the heart of things”. The original Survey, which began to appear in 1889, was the work of one rich, enlightened, and benevolent man. It has now been taken up again by a combination of public bodies, centring in the London School of Economics, and under the direction of the sometime Permanent Secretary of the Board of Trade. The change is significant of the vast advance in organisation and socialisation which has taken place in the interval. This introductory volume testifies to many other changes in the life of the people of London; and the pleasantest thought, after reading it, is that, on the whole and in almost every measurable aspect, the people of London are better off than when Charles Booth first surveyed them. The New Survey of London Life and Labour. Vol. 1: Forty Years of Change. Pp. xv + 438. (London: P. S. King and Son, Ltd., 1930.) 17s. 6d.