Charles Booth (social reformer)

Charles Booth (1840 to 1916) was an English reformer, social surveyor and social scientist who was at the same time a wealthy Victorian shipowner and captain of industry. The son of a prosperous Liverpool businessman, he founded a steamship business with his brother, and his wife was a cousin of Beatrice Webb. He knew the positivist theories of Auguste Comte without ever becoming a disciple. Troubled by poverty in the midst of plenty, he set out to discover the facts for himself, starting with the occupations of the people of the United Kingdom and then a depressed district of London. He organized and paid for the research behind his seventeen-volume Life and Labour of the People in London (1889 to 1891), which covered poverty, industry and religious influences. It divided Londoners into eight social classes by income and concluded that over 30 per cent of them lived below the line of poverty, a finding that shocked many readers. It is regarded as the first major survey in British sociology.