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Charles Booth was a pioneering social researcher whose work transformed how we understand poverty, inequality and everyday life in Victorian London. Best known for his groundbreaking Poverty Map, Booth combined detailed statistical research with firsthand observation to create one of the most vivid social portraits of a city ever produced. His investigations challenged popular assumptions about poverty, influenced social reform, and continue to shape the study of urban history, sociology and social policy today. This course uses Booth’s work as a lens through which to explore late-19th-century London, revealing how people lived, worked, believed and organised within a rapidly changing city.
Booth investigated working-class political movements, women’s lives, religious beliefs, immigrant experiences, children, schools and trades. Using Booth’s Poverty Map, we’ll examine London neighbourhoods using historical photos, sketches and eyewitness accounts.
Among the phenomena Booth investigated are: working-class political movements, women’s lives and economic status, religious/spiritual belief, late-Victorian immigrant experiences of the city, children and schools, the various trades of London.
By the end of the course, you should know:
• How to explain the basic concepts in Booth’s work
• How to identify the dominant socio-economic structure of late-19th-century London
• How to define the various political strands of thought current at the time
• How to recognise the characteristics of various individual London localities
• How to pursue further reading on these subjects, with a detailed bibliography/secondary reading list
Sarah Wise is an award-winning writer and historian. She teaches literature and nineteenth-century social history and literature at the University of California’s London Outreach Center. She has been teaching a variety of courses at the Bishopsgate since 2014. Her interests are London/urban history, working-class history, medical history, psychogeography, and nineteenth-century literature and reportage. Her books include Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England; The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave Robbery in 1830s London; and The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum. She contributed a chapter to ‘Charles Booth’s Poverty Maps’ -- last autumn’s best-selling illustrated book by Thames & Hudson/London School of Economics. Her TV work includes providing background material for BBC1’s ‘Secret History of Our Streets’, and BBC2’s ‘The Victorian Slum’, and she has twice been the history expert on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’
Week 1:
Theme: Introduction to Charles Booth and his work, and the ‘Map Indicative of Poverty’.
Place – the ‘Old Nichol’ district in Shoreditch
Week 2:
Place – Soho
Themes – the textiles and footwear industries of the West End; and the increasing division between East and West London
Week 3:
Place – Whitechapel Themes – the religious and spiritual life of the poor; the ‘common lodging house’ phenomenon; and the lives of Jewish immigrants to London
Week 4:
Place – Lisson Grove Themes – schools, the lives of children; and Booth’s team of investigators – who were they?
Week 5:
Place – the Docks, including Limehouse, Shadwell, Bermondsey and Rotherhithe.
Themes – the politicisation of the poor / trades unions
Week 6:
Place – Covent Garden Themes – unemployment and how to end it; what happened next? The ‘Liberal Reforms’, 1906 to 1914. And Booth’s survey revisited (in 1930)
Nothing.
You may wish to peruse in advance the Booth Archive website on the LSE’s site here: https://booth.lse.ac.uk/
Digitised volumes of Life and Labour can be looked at here:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Booth%2C+Charles%2C+1840-1916%22+london&page=2
Other literature courses at Mary Ward Centre
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