Charles Booth

• Charles Booth rejected the hard line of the COS that poverty was the fault of the poor. He also didn't blame the capitalist system itself for creating poverty.
• After some involvement with the 1885 Mansion House Enquiry into Unemployment, Booth began his study. He wanted to explore why the poor lived as they did and wanted to explore the idea that there might be structural explanations for poverty, not just moral ones.
• Booth's investigation was originally only meant to last 3 years. However, the whole enquiry took closer to 17 years to complete. Booth was the one constant factor of the enquiry and at any one time he had a team of 35 men and women working with him, most of which were university educated.
• Booth and his team divided the population into classes. Although he acknowledged that the classes overlapped each other and no sharp distinctions were really possible, he firmly believed the distinction between the classes was fundamental to understanding the causes of poverty.
• Class A consisted of about 0.9% of the population who were at the bottom of any social hierarchy: semi-criminals, loafers and idlers, and people who sometimes took no occasional work. Booth believed that people were born into this class and rarely escaped from it. This class was the residuum - the dregs of society.
• Class B consisted of about 7% of the population who were casual, low paid workers. Most of them were dockers, who were employed on a daily basis and had no security of employment. Booth believed these people were, because of their mental, moral or physical state, incapable of bettering themselves.
• Class C were slightly better off than Class B but the irregular nature of their work meant that life was a constant struggle for survival.
• Class E and Class F together made up about 50% of the population who were in regular employment that paid enough to enable them to lead comfortable lives.
• Class G and Class H were the lower and upper middle classes who made up 18% of the population.
• Despite the detail of Booth's 17 volumes of work, there were contemporary criticisms. Booth himself admitted that he relied on observation only and didn't take into account income when defining poverty.
• Helen Bosanquet of the COS criticised Booth's work. She objected to the social survey method as it had no underpinning philosophy or principle. She believed his poverty line was flawed and put too high. She attacked the statistical basis of Booth's findings and the fact he focused on primary research findings of people like school board members and teachers.