Response: Exogenous Adaptation of Booth’s Work

My past three blog posts have been short biographies of the people involved in the East End census project following the Ripper murders. This week, I hope to take a more in-depth approach to their research and published results. There are several key conclusions outlined in Life and Labour of the People in London (1904, https://archive.org/details/b21357547_003) that significantly contribute to our current understanding of urban development. One such is the “poverty line” theory discussed in the first published volume.

Booth’s methodology was innovative, but was not conducted through an academic context. This explains why his theories were reworded or appropriated by other sociologists rather than taken in their true organic form. For example, we attribute the term “poverty line” to Booth and Life and Labour of the People in London but the exact term used was actually “line of poverty”(Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, p. 28). His “line of poverty” should actually be studied in the context of the entirety of his work, for the term is more of a generalization of the sub-categories he and his associates tried promoting through their illustrated urban maps.

The proliferation of his classification categories also indicates that the study was not pursued in an academic context. His combination of both status and income suggests that “[he] found ‘class’ to be a non-problematic concept…” (O’Day, “Retrieved Riches: Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London,” p. 30) which is why he disregarded conventional labels for custom ones. Groupings like “loafing, criminal classes” and “fairly comfortable” were never integrated in sociologic vernacular because they do not abide by accepted social terms; these groupings were only applicable to the East End because that is where they originated from. With this in mind, contemporary scholars can argue that Booth used a “bottom-top” approach instead of a “top-down” approach. This means that although the published conclusions were accurate and specific to the location of study, they do not constitute as the “rule” for all case studies.

However, Booth’s “poverty line” did become the rule for case studies. This is because the theory was adopted by the London School Board (1870, http://viewfinder.historicengland.org.uk/search/detail.aspx?uid=80318 ) and reworked by administrators there. School Board officials agreed that “Booth’s poverty line…was drawn arbitrarily in relation to ill-defined and uncertain income groups and applied inconsistently” (Gillie, “The Origin of the Poverty Line,” p. 728) so they reconstructed the concept using income levels to determine a quantified line. What emerged was an official “poverty line” which would be henceforth used in the development of welfare programs.

This differing legacy between Booth’s “poverty line” and his myriad of classifications demonstrates the impact of his work. Exogenous reformers selectively picked which Life and Labour theories to streamline, which explain why the term “poverty line” became more commonplace than the class category of “loafing, criminal classes.”