Volume 12, Number 2 · January 30, 1969
Poverty Program
By John Gross
Charles Booth's London
selected and edited by Albert Fried, by Richard M. Elman
Pantheon, 342 pp., $7.95
Charles Booth and the City
edited with an Introduction by Harold W. Pfautz
Chicago, 314 pp., $12.50
The Poor are always with us—or such, at least, was the accepted Victorian view. But exactly how many of them were there, and precisely how poor were they? Until the very end of the nineteenth century, these were questions which it was hard to answer with any marked degree of accuracy. Much piecemeal evidence was available, admittedly: bluebooks, industrial statistics, census returns, novels, essays in social criticism. Then, too, there were the first-hand accounts of conditions in the slums written by doctors, clergymen, charity workers, and journalists, of whom Henry Mayhew was an unrivaled but by no means unique example. The amateur sociology of the Victorian age deserves to be better known than it is, in fact; even such long-forgotten works as Sanitary Rambles and The Bitter Cry of Outcast London[*] still have a more than academic interest, and to label such literature moralistic or impressionistic is often to say nothing more damning about it than that the authors said what they felt and described what they saw. Still, when it came to the practical needs of social policy and social research, none of this was plainly any substitute for systematic fact-gathering on a comprehensive scale. For that, the Victorians had to wait until the 1890s; but at least when it came—in the shape of Charles Booth's monumental Life and Labour of the People in London (1889-1903)—it turned out to be very systematic and comprehensive indeed.
Review, 3553 words
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