CHARLES

See also:

• BOOTH (connected with a Teutonic root meaning to dwell, whence also " bower ")
• BOOTH, BARTON (1681–1933)
• CHARLES BOOTH (184o– )
• BOOTH, EDWIN [THOMAS] (1833–1893)

BOOTH (184o– )  , English sociologist, was born at Liverpool on the 30th of March 1840 . In 1862 he became a partner in Alfred Booth & Company, a Liverpool firm engaged in the Brazil trade, and subsequently chairman of the Booth Steamship Company . He devoted much time, and no inconsiderable sums of money, to inquiries into the statistical aspects of social questions . The results of these are chiefly embodied in a work entitled Life and Labour of the People in London (1891–1903), of which the earlier portion appeared under the title of Life and Labour in 1889 . The book is designed to show " the numerical relation which poverty, misery and depravity bear to regular earnings and comparative comfort, and to describe the general conditions under which each class lives." It contains a most striking series of maps, in which the varying degrees of poverty are represented street by street, by shades of colour . The data for the work were derived in part from the detailed records kept by school-board " visitors," partly from systematic inquiries directed by Mr Booth himself, supplemented by information derived from relieving officers and the Charity Organization Society . Mr Booth also paid much attention to a kindred subject—the lot of the aged poor . In 1894 he published a volume of statistics on the subject, and, in 1891 and 1899, works on Old-age pensions, his scheme for the latter depending on a general provision of pensions of five shillings a week to all aged persons, irrespective of the cost to the state . He married, in 1871, the daughter of Charles Zachary Macaulay . In 1904 he was made a privy councillor .