Poverty In London Research Articles

Thomas Sheraton (1751–1806) Leading Furniture Designer, Baptist Preacher and Polemicist

ABSTRACT Thomas Sheraton was born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1751 and died in poverty in London in 1806. He was arguably the greatest influence on English and American furniture styles at the end of the eighteenth century and for most of the nineteenth century because of his works on cabinet-making, and his influence was also felt on the European continent. He was also a religious polemicist and an ordained Baptist minister, publishing pamphlets on spiritual regeneration, baptism, and the relationship of the Christian to the state. This article, based partly on Sheraton's own works, traces his career both as a furniture designer and as a Baptist pastor and polemicist and deals with evaluations of the man and his work by writers in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France.

Utilising User Data from a Food-Sharing App to Evidence the "Heat-or-Eat" Dilemma

Introduction & BackgroundPrevious literature has found that financially vulnerable households often make involuntary spending trade-offs between necessities, particularly energy and food. This effect is especially pronounced during winter, when homes require greater energy expenditure to maintain an adequate temperature. Despite frequent colloquial and journalistic references to the "heat-or-eat dilemma”, there remains limited recent empirical evidence of this phenomenon in the UK. This is a considerable knowledge gap, given recent economic hardship and rising energy costs. Objectives & ApproachThis study uses survey data (n=2877), collected during winter 2022 in London, UK, to analyse the sociodemographic and behavioural characteristics of respondents affecting self-reported heat-or-eat trade-offs. The survey was deployed via users of the food-sharing app, OLIO, and quota restraints were enforced to ensure the socioeconomic representativeness of the sample (based on Index of Multiple Deprivation). The survey question of interest (i.e., the dependent variable) was ""in the past year, how frequently did your household reduce or forego expenses for basic household necessities, such as medicine or food, in order to pay an energy bill?"" and responses were recorded using a discrete, ordinal scale: never; 1-2 months; some months but not every month; almost every month. Given the nature of the dependent variable, the Random Parameters Ordered Probit (RPOP) model, a statistical modelling framework used in the case of discrete, ordered outcomes, was considered suitable. The RPOP approach allows the effect of various independent variables to be explored, which in this case, are sociodemographic and behavioural characteristics of respondents. Relevance to Digital FootprintsThe relevance to the digital footprints theme is embedded in the study’s aim: to draw insights into social issues through the analysis of sociodemographic and behavioural data retrieved from the users of a mobile app. ResultsInitial results show that a considerable proportion (~37%) of the sample made heat-or-eat trade-offs at least one month of the year. Interestingly, this is several times higher than the official rate of fuel poverty in London (11.9%), suggesting that the government’s fuel poverty metric fails to capture many homes that display signs of energy unaffordability. The RPOP model estimation results show that a broad range of sociodemographic variables (including features of household composition and disability), as well as several behavioural features derived from the respondents’ use of the OLIO app, including the frequency of app usage and food requests, significantly affected the likelihood of heat-or-eat trade-offs. Conclusions & ImplicationsOur results can be used to guide remedial food and fuel poverty policies. It may be particularly useful to focus on the sociodemographic variables that lead to heat-or-eat trade-offs, given that the English fuel poverty metric places arguably unjust focus on a home’s energy efficiency, rather than occupant characteristics.

Baildon Street: The Blackest Street in Deptford?

In 1899, one of Charles Booth's investigators, George Arkell, visited Deptford to revise the classifications provided on Booth's Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889. Arkell was more shocked and offended by Baildon Street than any other street he visited in Deptford. He was scathing in his comments and assessment of the street, and decided that it should remain coloured black, meaning ‘Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal’—an assessment that Booth agreed with. This article takes issue with Booth's assessment of Baildon Street and, in particular, with George Arkell's comments and the picture he painted of the lives and living conditions of those who resided there. The article shows that Baildon Street was not a chaotic place of social transience, nor was it a place systemically rife with prostitution, crime, violence, and child neglect. It also reveals the surprising ideas and factors that influenced Arkell in his investigative work.

Rawson Rawson and Early Victorian Poverty Knowledge

This article scrutinizes Rawson W. Rawson over seven years, from 1837 to 1844, during which he served as founding editor of the Journal of the Statistical Society of London and then as civil secretary to successive Canadian governors-general. Rawson studied poverty in London, amplified criticisms of Malthusian Poor Law disciplines in Scotland, and applied that logic to Indigenous poverty on the colonial frontier. The statisticians sought generic definitions of property and agency that sometimes challenged a more binary logic of civilization. But in Canada, Rawson's very critique of dispossession became an instrument of that dispossession.

Pictures of Poverty: The Works of George R. Sims and Their Screen Adaptations by Lydia Jakobs

Reviewed by: Pictures of Poverty: The Works of George R. Sims and Their Screen Adaptations by Lydia Jakobs John Plunkett (bio) Lydia Jakobs, Pictures of Poverty: The Works of George R. Sims and Their Screen Adaptations (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2021), pp. ix + 266, $39/ £34.66 paperback. Was there any creative endeavour that George R. Sims did not turn his hand to? A well-known journalist, comic writer, dramatist, and poet, as well as social critic and observer of London poverty and urban life, Sims was everywhere in the late-Victorian literary world. Sims was more than a prolific polymath though. As Lydia Jakobs's book makes clear, his work was fostered by a cultural landscape that encouraged crossovers between the worlds of literature, journalism, illustration, theatre, and public performance, whether in the form of penny readings, magic lantern shows, or early film. Jakobs's book joins a growing number of publications to flesh out the multifarious and extended lives enjoyed by individual texts and narratives in this profoundly intermedial world. Pictures of Poverty particularly focuses on mapping the way Sims's ballads and social exposés were remediated into lantern slide sets and film narratives. The magic lantern was at the height of its popularity in the period from 1880 to 1920, with hundreds of thousands of slides of every imaginable scientific, educational, and amusing subject, from travelogues and temperance [End Page 464] tales to illustrated hymns and adaptations of popular fiction. After 1896, audiences could also experience the cinematograph; the blossoming British film industry often sought to adapt and draw on popular narratives that were already well-known to the public. For both the lantern and early film, which coexisted happily across these decades, Sims's ballads were prime material for transferring into pictorial narratives. There were many such adaptations. Thirty-two of Sims's texts were adapted for the magic lantern, twenty-four of which are from the Dagonet Ballads (1881). Sims, according to magic lantern experts Joss Marsh and David Francis, was the most popular living writer for lantern adaptations. Jakobs's book takes us from Sims's most famous ballad, "In the Workhouse: Christmas Day," first published in 1877, to a film adaptation of the same ballad by G. D. Samuelson in 1914. Sims's own work was often a rich mix of the visual and textual. This was particularly true of his volumes on London and its underclass, which were illustrated by many photographs and illustrations. Jakobs is interested in Sims's work as an observer and reformer, evident in series such as How the Poor Live (1883) and Living London: Its Work and Its Play, Its Humour and Its Pathos, Its Sights and Its Scenes (1901–3). Jakobs's chosen title is Pictures of Poverty, and the book accordingly devotes as much time to discourses around Victorian poverty and its broader pictorial depictions, including those by Sims, as to the remediation of his work. This reviewer, however, found Sims's engagement with the lantern and cinematograph much more absorbing; it was fascinating to discover Sims's relationship with early film. He gave his name and approval to a film version of Living London produced by Charles Urban in 1904, which widely toured across England in 1905. In 1908, Sims was commissioned by the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation to write an adaptation of one of his short stories, "Lady Letmere's Jewellery" (1903); he also collaborated with Gaumont in 1909, credited as a script writer on "The Martyrdom of Adolf Beck." Sims's involvement in film was part of the narrative and social expansion of the burgeoning film industry, a drive to give the upstart medium an imprimatur of respectability through the involvement of well-known literary figures. In 1908, the Era praised Gaumont for "co-operating with Mr Geo. R Sims in the production of a high-class series of authorised cinematograph films" (104). Between 1914 and 1923, there were fifteen film adaptations of plays by Sims and his contributors. Jakobs's book is at its illuminating best when she focuses on three case studies to demonstrate the multiple remediations of Sims's work: How the Poor Live, "In the Workhouse: Christmas...

Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild

Reviewed by: Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild Ashley Walters (bio) Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes. By Adam Hochschild. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. 303 pp. On April 6, 1905, the American press was consumed by news of the young millionaire James Graham Phelps Stokes's engagement to a twenty-five year old former factory worker and Jewish immigrant named Rose Pastor. Newspapers recounted in detail the unlikely origins of Stokes's intended—a working-class Jew from the Polish region of the Russian Empire—and waxed poetic about the couple's shared mission to ameliorate [End Page 85] the plight of the immigrant poor. At a time when the US was undergoing immense social and economic dislocation and being torn apart by heated debates about inequality, immigration, and the future character of the country, the story of a kindly aristocrat falling in love with an immigrant factory worker was one that the American public was eager to digest. Adam Hochschild's recent biography of Rose Pastor Stokes is a welcome arrival given the relative dearth of publications about one of the most captivating early twentieth-century Americans. Born in Augustowa, a shtetl in the northeastern region of Polish Russia, Pastor spent eight years living in extreme poverty in London's notorious East End before immigrating to Cleveland. At the age of eleven, Pastor went to work in the first of several cigar factories, where she would spend twelve years in order to support her mother, an alcoholic stepfather, and six siblings. Chance took her to New York when an editor at the Jewish Daily News discovered her literary talents and offered her a job. Several months later, she was assigned to investigate rumors of turmoil at the University Settlement on the Lower East Side, where she met its most prominent resident worker, the fabulously wealthy Stokes. In July 1905, the two wed at the Phelps Stokes family's estate in Connecticut amidst an unusual mix of guests hailing from the upper crust of Madison Avenue and the tenements of the Lower East Side. Hochschild explains that the Pastor-Stokes marriage immediately became the stuff of legend—a veritable Cinderella story similar to the romantic plots of the cheap dime novels that Pastor's fellow factory workers would have read—and catapulted the two to instant celebrity status. It was the postnuptial activities of the couple, Hochschild notes, that are actually the more interesting part of the story. Shortly after their wedding they joined the Socialist Party and quickly became two of its most popular speakers, dedicating the prewar years to traversing the country and speaking about the injustices of capitalism. They even established a retreat on a private island off the coast of Stamford, Connecticut, where they hosted an illustrious array of socialist intellectuals, writers, and artists. Hochschild deftly uses the constraints placed upon radical intermarriages like Pastor and Stokes (there were several such couples) as a window into the complicated attitudes that Americans harbored toward capitalism, global warfare, and the Russian Revolution. He is clearly most in his element when situating their story in the broader context of Progressive Era politics. He recounts in detail the various major labor disputes in which Pastor assumed an active role, such as the Uprising of 20,000 (1909) and the New York City Waiters' Strike (1912), in addition [End Page 86] to the dramatic 1916 birth control rally at Carnegie Hall where Pastor incited a mob. Additionally, he captures the spirit of America's entry into the First World War and its devastating impact on the radical left from 1917 onward. Hochschild's rich narration of major world events at times overshadows Pastor and her own various doings. America's entry into the war in 1917 marked a pivotal moment when members of the radical left were forced to choose between hewing to a nationalist party line or risk becoming an enemy of the state. While Stokes wholeheartedly embraced the US war effort, Pastor became a vocal critic and began her descent from America's sweetheart to national threat...

Is the report of the death of the construct of usability an exaggeration

Mark Twain was undecided whether to be more amused or annoyed when a Journal representative informed him today of the report in New York that he was dying in poverty in London... The great humorist, while not perhaps very robust, is in the best of health. He said: I can understand perfectly how the report of my illness got about, I have even heard on good authority that I was dead. James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness. The report of my death was an exaggeration. New York Journal, 6/2/1897

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

Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the London Poor is a much turned-to source for historians of Victorian poverty and the working classes of modern London. In this book, Thomas R.C. Gibson-Brydon turns to Booth’s lesser-studied ‘Religious Influences’ series within the survey to better understand what he calls Booth’s moral-religious sensibility in his approach to London poverty. Gibson-Brydon asserts that the consistent thread in Booth’s work was dependent on two elements: ‘commitment to the moral division of working people and an overriding concern for improperly selective charity’. Beginning with Booth’s character, the importance of religion in Booth’s personal life and world-view is examined: his belief in the self-improvement afforded by appropriately practised religion and his uncompromising stance on charity. This provides the backdrop to the urgent question at the heart of the book: ‘who hierarchized poor London?’, with the corresponding call to decide who did, or did not, deserve charity. The answer, persuasively detailed in this engaging and illuminating text, outlines the nuance of the relationships between Booth and his surveyors and those whom they surveyed. Not only did charities and philanthropists use Booth’s maps as a scientific tool to decide to whom they gave assistance, but charitable workers and members of the working classes influenced and confirmed the poverty maps’ designations.

Beyond the strictly orthodox/mainstream divide: Applying geodemographic analysis to a small nationwide sub-population

The use of geodemographic analysis has a long history, arguably stretching back to Charles Booth's Descriptive Map of London's Poverty, produced in 1886 and the published classification of areas has invariably been based on all residents. The work described in this paper, however, is novel in the use of geodemographic analysis to focus on a single minority group within a national census. This paper describes the development of a methodology which allows geodemographic analysis to be applied to unevenly distributed minority sub-populations, overcoming two particular issues: finding a suitable geographic base to ensure data reliability; and developing a methodology to avoid known weaknesses in certain clustering techniques, specifically distortion caused by outlier cases and generation of sub-optimal local minimum solutions. The approach, which includes a visual element to final classification selection, has then been applied to establish the degree to which the Jewish population in an area is similar in character to, or differs from, Jews living in other areas of England and Wales, using data from the 2011 census. That group has been selected because of the maturity of its presence in Britain — study of this group may point the way for examination of other, more recently arrived, sub-populations. Previous studies have generally assumed homogeneity amongst ‘mainstream’ Jews and have not considered spatial variation, separating out only strictly orthodox enclaves. This paper demonstrates that there are indeed distinct socio-economic and demographic differences between Jewish groups in different areas, not fully attributable to the underlying mainstream social geography, whilst also identifying a strong degree of spatial clustering; it also establishes the practicality of applying geodemographic analysis to minority groups.

The burden of poverty in children with haemoglobinopathies presenting to a London tertiary referral centre

Background The burden of poverty and its impact on children with sickle cell disease has been documented in the United States of America where healthcare is accessed via health insurance programs. In the UK, there are few references in the literature to the impact of poverty on sickle cell disease or the extent of poverty within the sickle cell population. However, there has been media coverage of children with sickle cell disease, entering the country illegally, being deported to countries with inadequate healthcare provisions. Objectives We aim to show the demographics of children attending a tertiary haemoglobinopathy referral centre, and the locations of their respective domiciles to examine the burden of poverty and deprivation within the areas of residence. Methods The postcodes of 256 paediatric haemoglobinopathy patients were plotted on a map of the boroughs served by the hospital. The deprivation and poverty indices of each borough were then analysed. The highest areas of poverty within each borough were located and compared to where the children were resident. Results 49% of children attending the hospital lived in the borough of Enfield, ranked 15th highest out of 32 London boroughs for child poverty. Enfield is ranked as the 74th most deprived borough in the country out of 354 boroughs. 35% of children lived in the borough of Haringey ranked as the 5th most deprived London borough with the 4th highest level of child poverty in London. Haringey is the 18th most deprived borough in England. The children from both Enfield and Haringey lived in the most deprived areas of those boroughs. Conclusions There is a strong link between poverty and haemoglobinopathies based on the findings from this study. 84% of the children with a haemoglobinopathy lived in two of the most deprived boroughs in the country with high levels of child poverty. 3% of the children were on a child protection plan and many more had social problems including problems with immigration. The impact of this poverty to their health is yet undetermined but further studies are planned by the authors of this paper.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900

Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900

Health, inequality and child poverty in London.

In a country as wealthy as the UK, no child should live in poverty. Despite this the UK has one of the highest child poverty rates among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and the one of the lowest rates of child wellbeing in the EU.1 This shameful waste of childhood and squandering of human talent violates children's rights, and has massive implications for the health of London's children.

Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 by Ellen Ross, Ed.

Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 by Ellen Ross, Ed.

London through Rose-Colored Graphics: Visual Rhetoric and Information Graphic Design in Charles Booth's Maps of London Poverty

In this article, I examine a historical information graphic—Charles Booth's maps of London poverty (1889–1902)—to analyze the cultural basis of ideas of transparency and clarity in information graphics. I argue that Booth's maps derive their rhetorical power from contemporary visual culture as much as from their scientific authority. The visual rhetoric of the maps depended upon an ironic inversion of visual culture to make poverty seem a problem that could be addressed, rather than an insurmountable crisis. This visual rhetoric led directly to significant features of and concepts in western societies, including the poverty line and universal old-age pensions (social security).

Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire by Felix Driver (review)

Reviews signs of cultural degeneration. Occupying interesting middle ground here are Virginia and Leonard Woolf — her financial success as a writer whose market niche turned out to considerably exceed the dimensions of her celebrated Room, their commercial success as hard-working but not debilitatingly soft-nosed intellectual niche publishers. A recurring theme in this book is the widespread misunderstanding or misuse among cultural critics of the term commodification. Contrary to those like Frederic Jameson who claim that "only art that is not commodified is good,"(186) Delany observes that because it is not a material necessity art has almost always commodified according to Marx's definition, its value "based on exchange rather than any objective estimate of the labour embodied in it"(121) In his coda, "The Way We Write Now," he celebrates what is perhaps the most remarkable "peculiarity of the English" — the fact that their mastery of the tertiary market, the service market, that has enabled them to escape the prescriptions of Marx and to confound the prophets of decline, has enabled them to create a world language and to command the global cultural market place to a degree that is still not fully appreciated because of critics of globalism's fixation on the United States — though J.K. Rowling is doing her bit to change this. Christopher Kent University of Saskatchewa Felix Driver. Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration andEmpire. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), viii + 258 pp. The title of Felix Driver's engaging book, Geography Militant, comes from a 1923 essay byJoseph Conrad ("The Romance of Travel"), that was reprinted in National Geographic in March 1924 under the title "Geography and Some Explorers." In the essay, "Conrad charted three epochs in the history of geographical knowledge" (3). The first of these, Geography Fabulous was best exemplified by the fantastical marginalia that fill the spaces of medieval cartography. The second phase, Geography Militant, was crystallized for Conrad in the figure of Captain Cook and "exemplified a more worldly quest for empirical knowledge about the geography of 100volume 29 number 2 Reviews the earth, marked by voyages of exploration and land." The final epoch, Geography Triumphant, described Conrad's own moment when, as he describes famously in Heart of Darkness, the blank spaces of the earth had all been filled. This last stage, relates Driver, was characterized by a high degree of "nostalgic lament for the spirit of heroic exploration represented by Geography Militant, a spirit which had apparendy been extinguished in modernity's wake" (4). The two titles of Conrad's essay highlight a conflict within the field of Geography, an arena that for Driver describes an array of practices that encompass the pleasurable entertainments of romantic travel and the instrumentally serious business of scientific exploration, description, and systemization. With the exception of a final chapter on "Geography Militant and Its After-Life," which quickly, but perhaps necessarily , bridges the gap between 1900 and our own moment, the subjects of his chapters are Victorian sites, heroes, and institutions: the Royal Geographical Society, David Livingstone; the novelist Winwood Reade; Henry Morton Stanley; the Stanley and African Exhibition (1 890) in Regent Street; a court case surrounding the display of two African "slave boys" at that exhibition; and, finally, the two great explorers of Darkest England, General William Booth of the Salvation Army and Charles Booth, who exhaustively documented the landscape of London poverty. In selecting his title from an essay by a British novelist that appeared in the magazine of an institution (the National Geographic Society) which attempted to bridge elite and popular cultures or, rather, the very different missions of serious science and the popularisation of scientific knowledge, Driver wonderfully encapsulates his book's central concerns. His argument is also underscored by the book's subtide, "Cultures of Exploration and Empire." Driver repeatedly makes the point that his object of study is not some narrow academic discipline but "a set of cultural practices which involve the mobilization of people and resources, especially equipment, publicity and authority" (8). Indeed, at times, the book's primary aim seems to become a polemic against thinking about Geography, or even specific geographical institutions (in particular the Royal Geographical Society), in terms of Latour...

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.

Creating the Charles Booth Online Archive: from nineteenth century London poverty to twenty‐first century digital riches

The Charles Booth Online Archive from the library of the London School of Economics gives free access to materials from Booth’s survey into life and labour in London 1886‐1903. The content of the archive is described and the funding arrangements for the project outlined. Cataloguing and text digitisation arrangements are discussed and the method digitising the 12 maps from the survey explained. Details are presented of how the Web‐site was created.

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....

POPULAR REACTIONS TO SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH: THE CASE OF CHARLES BOOTH

When Charles Booth first published his research on poverty in London in 1886 he became what might have been the first sociological ‘household name’. His findings were widely reported around the world and across newspapers of very different political orientation. As social scientists continue to grapple with the difficulties and rewards of publicity it is worth looking back to this first instance of the political and media uses of social research. In particular, it is worth noting the triangular and reflexive relationship between the researcher, the media, and policy makers.

Popular Reactions to Sociological Research: The Case of Charles Booth

When Charles Booth first published his research on poverty in London in 1886 he became what might have been the first sociological `household name'. His findings were widely reported around the world and across newspapers of very different political orientation. As social scientists continue to grapple with the difficulties and rewards of publicity it is worth looking back to this first instance of the political and media uses of social research. In particular, it is worth noting the triangular and reflexive relationship between the researcher, the media, and policy makers.