LABOUR AND LIFE OF THE PEOPLE, 1891 and 1902
4 vol., including 'Volume I: East London', 'Volume II: London Continued', 'Appendix to Volume II', and 'Final Volume: Notes of Social Influences and Conclusion' complete with seven folding coloured maps on linen

Charles Booth belongs to a distinguished breed of remarkable, ambitious Victorian social reformers. A successful shipowner and leather merchant who produced the most comprehensive social survey London had ever seen. After canvassing the slums of Toxteth for the Liberal candidate in 1865, he came to recognise how insufficient a tool existing philanthropy and conditional charity were as means to address the endemic poverty around him.

In 1885 Henry Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation published an inquiry claiming that a quarter of Londoners lived in extreme poverty. Booth however considered the figure to be exagerrated and spent the following 17 years investigating the matter with his wife Mary and others (including Beatrice Webb, Clara Collet and George Duckworth).

The survey was organised into three series: poverty, industry, and religious influences. Its most celebrated matter of substance were in fact the poverty maps, which coloured each London road from black to gold according to the physical and economic condition of its inhabitants. They remain among the most important documents in British social history.

Their consequence, however, exists in a realm far beyond the celebrity of their maps. The outcome of Booth's findings was to establish that the true figure of those living in poverty was not the previously 'overstated' 25% but in fact nearer to 35%. Booth campaigned for free school meals and state old age pensions, and lived to see them introduced in 1906 and 1908 respectively. Booth’s legacy therefore is one of remarkable consequence, laying the first foundations of the welfare state.

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